Movie

Review: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

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This movie is a spaghetti western, horror, romance, fairy tale, neo-noir, Iranian vampire movie filmed in California!?!?!  This film is a stew of classic film ingredients by first time director and writer Ana Lily Amirpour.  I really look forward to seeing more from her, what a great eye in filming and what an original intriguing story.

I seen this just based on the buzz and did not know much about this going in.  I really thought it was just a well done horror movie worth seeing.  Then I put the Blu-Ray in and was totally surprised.  I did not plan to review this for this site, until I watched it and seen more than a few simple nods to the classic film noir era.  This film has a timeless feel to it, there is a 1950’s Thunderbird, classic oil wells and factories, and timeless clothing that could fit into almost any time frame. We do have fake posters of 1980’s pop stars on the wall and our soundtrack has music from the 2000’s. If you didn’t know better you could think this was filmed in the 1950’s as easily as filmed in the 2010’s.

Sheila Vand plays The Girl and Arash Marandi gives us his best James Dean playing Arash for our two leads.  We don’t have to many characters confusing the plot here.  Marshall Manesh plays Arash’s junkie father, Mozhan Marnò plays the local prostitute, Dominic Rains as a drug dealer, and Rome Shadanloo as the little rich girl.

This movie has a lot of symbolism and references to other films, this may be all subjective and you will find things I may not and you may not agree with what I felt I seen.  That is what makes this such a great film.

Our story starts with Arash getting in to his car and drives home.  We see his Dad shooting up with drugs.  Our drug dealer enters the house and wants paid.  He takes Arash’s car for the debt.  Our drug dealer soon picks up our prostitute in his new ride and later picks up The Girl.  He takes her back to his house and soon The Girl reveals she is a vampire and kills the drug dealer.  On her way out of the house she pass Arash, going in to try to get his car back.  Arash finds the body and takes the drug suppl and gets his keys to his car back.  Our romance starts as well as we go deeper into our story from here.

For noir fans, the plot is deep in the crime world of Bad City and has some great noir nods, like a femme fatale, she just happens to be a vampire.  If your a film noir fan and don’t like vampires, you will still love the cinematography!  A couple stills from the film that shows a taste of this:

So this film is for anybody who wants to see something new and fresh and original no matter what kind of movies you like.  This basically covers every genre out there and has something for everybody.  Go enjoy this film as soon as you can!

Review: Danger Signal

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Danger Signal is a classic film noir from 1945 starring Faye Emerson as our femme fatale, or is she?  With Zachary Scott as our protagonist.   Robert Florey directs and looks to have directed not only some crime dramas and film noirs, but a bunch of movies from different genres.

This is a simple plot and well executed.  We have Zachary Scott’s character jumping out of a married women’s bedroom window as the police are at the front door.  He gets away and the authorities think it is suicide.  He gets a few bucks out of her purse on the way out.  We then go to Emerson’s character as a secretary for a doctor, she seems happy, but is looking for love.  She soon finds it in Scott the new stranger in town.  The romance seems to blossom and they are soon engaged.  Soon Emerson’s little sister comes to town on the train, played by Mona Freeman.  The little sister is going to get $25,000 when she marries and soon we see Scott’s character leaning towards the younger sister.  Emerson becomes suspicions of this and wants to kill Scott.  Will she succeed or will our lead marry the younger sister and live off the $25000 until its gone?

Like I said, this is a pretty simple plot with not a lot of twists and turns, but a bit of a surprise ending.  This doesn’t look like an overly popular film noir, but is worth watching for big noir fans or fans of Scott and Emerson.

Review: The Gambler

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The Gambler is a neo noir film from last year and I was finally able to see it on Blu-Ray.  The reviews are a mixed bag for this film.  I got to say I really enjoyed it.  I loved the noirish cinematography, the story and the performances. Reading some of the headlines for the negative reviews for this film, mention how it don’t stand up to the original.  I’m the first to jump on the” re-make is unnecessary” camp and understand where these people are coming from.  I, unfortunately have never seen the original(though I hope to someday) so I went into this film with no preconceived idea of what to expect.  Maybe this is why I enjoyed it so much.

This film is based on the original screenplay by James Toback and tweaked for a new generation by William Monahan who has done some great neo-noir and crime films.  The film is directed by Rupert Wyatt.

This film stars Mark Wahlberg as our anti-hero main character.   He is a writer and a professor, but that is second to being a gambler.  We also have Jessica Lange as his mother.  Brie Larson as his brilliant student and his romantic interest as well as perhaps his saver.  We have Michael Kenneth Williams and John Goodman as opposing gangsters. We also have Williams’ co-star from The Wire,Domenick Lombardozzi, showing up as Goodman’s top henchman.

Our story starts with Wahlberg gambling in a Korean gambling den.  He is playing blackjack and doing very well at first, he then loses.  The Korean’s want their money, Williams offers Wahlberg $50,000 to try to get even, he doesn’t.  He then goes to Goodman for a loan.  Goodman reminds him that Williams will kill him if he doesn’t pay back his debt.  We then find Wahlberg at his day job as a professor.  We take off from there as he juggles his debt, his family, and his class of students.

I really liked the neo noir filming style in this film.  One of the things you will notice while watching this is each person our protagonist owes money has their own color,the Korean’s color is green, Michael Kenneth Williams’ gang has the color black and John Goodman’s color is red. I first picked upon this in the scene where Wahlberg is waiting to be picked up by Lombardozzi.  I noticed all the cars are white, grey and black in a wash of Land Rovers and BMW’s we see Lombardozzi pull up in a bright red Porsche Cayenne.  There are a lot of beautiful noir like scenes in this from the smokey gambling halls, to a grayed out class room, to the neon lights of a casino.  I also loved the soundtrack for this film and how it was used.  Also pay attention to Wahlberg’s suit throughout the film and how it changes.

Like I said, I really liked this film, but I have not seen the original.  I think if you go into this with fresh eyes and do not compare it to the original you may enjoy it too.  I would love to hear from those lucky enough to see both of these films and what your thought on both are.

Favorite tidbit: Mark Wahlberg dropped 61lbs for his role going from 198lbs to 137lbs, to show the characters lack of caring about his health and well-being.

Review: The Wages of Fear or Le Salaire de la Peur

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The Wages of Fear is an interesting film and very good, but is it a classic film noir?  While watching this I was on the fence and looked for other people’s opinion on the matter.  Wikipedia and AMC do not list it in their full list of film noir titles.  The Film Noir Foundation does, and John Grant has it in his “A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Film Noir.”  If you don’t know about John Grant check out his blog at https://noirencyclopedia.wordpress.com/ for a ton of noir information.

My argument for it not being a film noir is there really isn’t anything illegal going on here, sure our big American oil company is immoral and all about the mighty dollar.  Sure some of the things they did in this film would be illegal today, but in the 1950’s it was probably all legit.  There is no femme fatale to speak of, Vera Clouzot is almost the anti-femme fatale.  All she cares about is the safety of her main man.  The shooting of the film is not in the classic noir style except in a few key scenes.  Hardly any shadow play is used, being most of the film takes place in the middle of the day in the desert.

My argument for it being a noir story is quite simple, a handful of characters are put in a situation they have very little hope of getting out of.  When they see their chance, they take it, even though they know their chances are slim to none.  They will almost do anything in their means for a little hope.  They are average men put in an extreme circumstance like all good noirs.  The end isn’t exactly a happy one either, another trademark of a good noir.

This movie is based on the book by Georges Arnaud and is adapted for the screen and directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot.   It stars Yves Montand  as our main hero, Mario.  This is Montand’s first dramatic role and what a role!  He went on to make many great films and I look forward to watching more of his work.

This story starts with Mario and some other ex-pats in a small bar in an unknown village.  We see Linda, Vera Clouzot’s character, washing the bar floor and soon crawls over and purrs like a cat as Mario pets her.  A very interesting scene as we get an idea of Linda’s situation.

A new man flies into town on the plane by the name of Jo, played by Charles Vanel.  We soon find out how it is cheap to get to this village but there is no work and it is very expensive to get out.  We have a small group of guys stuck in the village, scraping by on odd jobs, just enough to get a meal and a drink at the bar on a good day.  The opportunity arises when the big oil company has a oil well blow up and they need some nitroglycerin shipped over 300 miles to the site to extinguish the well.  Knowing the unions would never send any of their own men to do the task, they get the group to compete for one of 4 spots on driving 2 trucks to the site.  Knowing they have a 50% chance of making it, do to the lack of the right equipment and the nature of the nitroglycerin, 1 of the 2 trucks should make it.  This only gets darker and more intense from here.

After watching this, you can see why America edited out over 50 minutes of footage so they would not look to bad.  The greed of the big corporation is nothing new, but it is interesting to see this from a French prospective.  This movie is an amazing movie, every film buff should see it least once, but is it a film noir?  What do you think?

Favorite Tidbit:  Vera Clouzot only appeared in 3 films, all directed by her husband Henri-Georges Clouzot.  One of her other two films is Diabolique.  Not a bad hitting percentage.

Review: Copycat

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This is the first time I’m seeing this film, even though it was released 20 years ago.  When I would go to the video store, I would pick it up and then put it down for something else.  I saw it playing on cable television, but something else was always on which I wanted to see more.  I finally watched it, after all these years.

This film is directed by Jon Amiel and written by David Madsen and Ann Biderman.  Biderman has gone on to write some great neo-noir and crime stuff for both movies and television.  This has a star-studded cast with Sigourney Weaver, Holly Hunter, Dermot Mulroney and Harry Connick Jr. being the big names in this film.

This film starts out with Weaver giving a lecture on serial killers, establishing her as our expert on the subject for this film.  She is attacked by Connick in the bathroom after her lecture and our opening credits role.  We then meet Mulroney and Hunter as homicide detectives doing some training.  They find a murder victim and feel they have a serial killer on their hands.  They soon recruit Weaver to help them.  She discovers our killer is emulating famous serial killers throughout history.  The investigation takes off from there.

This film feels average among a rush of neo-noir films coming out in the 1990’s, you can feel The Silence of The Lambs influences on this as well as having the bad luck to come out the same year as Se7en.  It seems to be rehashing these ground breaking films of the time but not bringing anything really new to the table.  Weaver said she was most proud of this film, but also said that the film was lost in the shuffle of all the thrillers coming out at this time.  It’s a good film, I think it maybe a bit to long at over 2 hours to tell this story.  I think they could have edited out a murder or two and cranked up the intensity for a more taut feeling film.  It is a must see for Weaver fans and Hunter fans won’t be disappointed.  If you love your serial killer thrillers from the 1990’s this should be on your “to watch list” if you have not seen it yet.

Official Teaser Trailer for Legend

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I came across this trailer this morning.  This film Legend is written and directed by neo-noir great Brian Helgeland and starring Tom Hardy as identical twin brothers who happen to be gangsters. This is based on real life gangsters Ronald and Reginald Kray.  Looks like an amazing film to look forward to later this year.  What do you think?

Review: Nightfall

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I had this on my DVR from a showing on TCM and found the introduction to the movie interesting.  Now legendary noir author David Goodis wrote NIghtfall as a screenplay after his success with the film Dark Passage.  Dark Passage put him in the spotlight and he was in Hollywood putting his writing skills to use.  He wrote a screenplay with this story and nobody wanted it.  He got flustered with the Hollywood machine and turned it into a book.  Roughly 10 years later Stirling Silliphant took the book and made it into this screenplay.  He changed a few scenes and gave the bad guy heavies a little more depth and character.  This gave it another chance in Hollywood and it was made into this movie.

film noir directing great Jacques Tourneur was in the directors chair for this film.  It also stars Aldo Ray and Anne Bancroft as our romantic couple.  Brian Keith and Rudy Bond play our thug like bank robbers and we also have James Gregory as an insurance investigator.

This film starts out with Aldo Ray at a news stand looking at papers from the Chicago area.  Gregory talks to him at the corner waiting for his bus.  Then Ray walks into a bar and meets Anne Bancroft.  They hit it off and have dinner, after dinner our two thugs jump our couple.  Bancroft is sent home and Ray is taken in a car.  From here Ray and the thugs battle it out through out the film and the story is told with a few flashbacks to see how our thugs and our hero come to meet.  Our adventure goes from the classic noir streets of Los Angles to the wilderness of Wyoming.

I am surprised with the talent in this film, from the great writing and directing to some good performances from our cast, that this movie isn’t more talked about.  If you’re a fan of any of the cast or crew or just a classic film noir fan, you should check out this film.  It will be well worth your time.

Re-watching Angel Heart

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large_zVABs77t8P6flUShTnnTHjeTc3w  Angel Heart is a neo noir horror film from 1987.  Though this film was made with two of the biggest movie stars from the 1980’s, Robert De Niro(one of the biggest stars ever) and Micky Rourke it was not a big hit in theaters.  This was also directed by Alan Parker who had 3 or 4 hits under his belt when he made this movie. William Hjortsberg wrote the book this film is based on and has written a few other noir books.  I must say I’ve never read any of Hjortsberg’s books but hope to in the future.

With all this talent on the film, this film was more known at the time of its release for having Lisa Bonet in it.  At the time Lisa Bonet was the second biggest star of the hit television series The Cosby Show, so big she had her own spin-off series A Different World.  Both T.V. series had the biggest television star of The Cosby Show and all of television at the time,  Bill Cosby, behind them, he created both series.  Cosby had a lot riding on Lisa Bonet’s star power.  In this film Bonet plays a southern girl who is into voodoo and maybe even worse appears nude on-screen having sex with the main character while being splashed in blood.  This did not make Mr. Cosby happy, putting a black eye on two of his family oriented and biggest shows in one fell swoop.  I don’t  know if the controversy helped or hurt the film, but either way this was a flop at the box office.  Did Bill Cosby’s pull, hinder the distribution of this film?  I don’t know, but flashing forward almost 30 years we are learning more about the pull Cosby had and how he used it.  I would be interested in knowing if this being released at only 800 some odd theaters had something to do more with Cosby’s influence, then a failure on the distributors.  Even at the time of its release, it got very good reviews and was well received, but did not find an audience in theaters.  I think most people, like myself, had to wait for its VHS release to watch this film.

This film takes place in the mid 1950’s in New York as our protagonist Harry Angel goes to meet the mysterious Louis Cyphre played by Robert De Niro.  Cyphre hires Angel to find an old associate he helped with his music career before the war, called Johnny Favorite.  Johnny Favorite did not pay back his debt and has disappeared after the war and can not be found.  This leads Angel on a trail which leads to varies characters, most of which end up murdered soon after Angel interviews them.  The case leads him to the south, where he soon comes across voodoo worshipers and more craziness.

This film does have a horror element and has a great noir style in story and cinematography.  De Niro is great as Cyphre, not a big surprise, and Rourke is very good as our main character.  This is for both of the main stars fan base as well as those of Bonet.  It is also worth checking out for neo noir fans as well as horror fans alike.

Re-Watching the Classics: D.O.A.

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220px-DOA1950 ” I want to report a murder.”

“Sit down. Where was this murder committed?”

“San Francisco, last night.”

“Who was murdered?”

” I was.”

Maybe the greatest opening dialog in noir history.  D.O.A. is a classic film noir from 1950 directed by Rudolph Maté who was a director and cinematographer for many great noir films through out his career.  Edmond O’Brien plays our protagonist Frank Bigalow who runs across many characters in this film, from a needy girl friend to a blonde at the end of the bar, to shady business men and a few doctors, police and a thug or two. DOA+trio The story is a simple one but an original one. Frank has to get away and goes to San Francisco on a small vacation.  He arrives at his hotel and joins a group of salesmen for a fun night on the town.  He gets a call from his girlfriend/secretary about somebody trying to get a hold of him.  He doesn’t recognize the name and figures it’s nothing.  After his night out he wakes up in the morning not feeling well.  He goes to the doctor and finds he has been poisoned.  There is no cure and he has only a day or two to live.  He uses his time left to hunt down who murdered him and why. This is such an interesting plot device that it has been remade and reworked a number of times.  The film was remade twice, once as Color Me Dead in 1969(I have not seen this) and D.O.A. in 1988(I have seen this, but it has been years, I hope to re-watch it and review it later).  The “I’ve been murdered and only have x amount of time to find the killer” plot has been done in such movies as Crank and to a certain extent in Zift as well. Though this plot has been redone in one form or another many times, this original movie is still the best of the bunch.   This is a film who classic film buffs as well as film noir fans will both find satisfying.  It’s a fun ride and if you think about it, what would you do, if you found out you only have a few days to live?

Review: Zift

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Zift is a film from Bulgaria, made in 2008.  It is filmed in black and white and takes place in the 1940’s and 1960’s.Vladislav Todorov wrote both the book in which the movie is based as well as the script. Javor Gardev directed and it looks to be his only film to date.

Zift is a great combination of modern neo noir with nods to movies like Pulp Fiction as well as classic noir style with nods to films like Gilda.  There are plot points which remind me of D.O.A. and Shawshank Redemption as well as scenes which reminded me of Sin City and the bar scene is an obvious nod to Gilda, but reminded me of a number of other classic noirs.  So is this just a rehash of great noir films of the past?  Yes and no, it is, but it adds a lot of originality as well.

The story starts with our hero in prison for a murder he did not commit.  Zahary Baharov plays our hero and has appeared in a few American productions.  We use flashbacks to tell his story of how he got in prison and some of his adventures while in prison.  The main story takes place over one day, the day he gets out of prison for good behavior.  He is meet at the gate by two men who give him a ride.  Along the way we meet our hero’s first love, a classic femme fatale in every sense, played by Tanya Ilieva.  She starts out as his sweetheart in school, after prison she is singing in a night club and far more jaded about life.  We also come across an old partner named Slug.

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This story is really dark and puts a lot of grim noir scenarios in an hour and a half.  There are also some comedic moments, most of them I did not find funny, maybe it was lost in translation.   Overall an enjoyable neo noir film. I didn’t know a bunch about this one but glad I was able to see it.  This is going to be for foreign noir fans and people who enjoy avant-garde foreign films.