Category: Film

A host of others, smiling killers and gruesome butlers, stalk through the dark,rainy landscape of the film like wraiths. The Big Sleep [1946] is something other than a detective story, with the drive toward rationality that designation is supposed to represent. It is a carnival of criminality, its underworld supernumeraries crowing the film not so much as picturesque character bits, but as tiny, finely-drawn portrayals of deceit and self-interest in a tapestry of meanness.

—Kevin Hagopian, Film Noir Reader 4, p. 42

Something for those of us with too much time on our hands: Gleeful Gecko points out that IMDB has quietly made available a modest list of feature-length movies for free viewing in a lo-fi window. The offerings are all over the map—everything from The Toxic Avenger to Lost in Translation.

Via Bookslut: a Chris Ware animation of a story from This American Life. How cool is that?!

Via 11D: Joe Queenan parses awful, or why The Hottie and the Nottie is not in the same class of wretched as Heaven’s Gate.

…that is the reason I became a critic in the first place; criticism seemed to be a way to channel my unwholesome fascination with train wrecks and fires into a socially acceptable framework. The truth is, every time I go to the pictures, I get goose bumps all over, anticipating that this, after all these years, could be the worst movie ever made.

Sadly, it never is.

From the very start of his career, [Michael] Haneke’s films have been calculated to shatter the viewer’s complacency to a degree rarely seen since the early work of Mike Leigh or perhaps since the politicized days of the French New Wave.

John Wray profiles the Austrian director, who made The Piano Teacher and Caché. He is remaking his Funny Games in English with Tim Roth and Naomi Watts.

Edward Copeland has released his collaborative 100-best list of foreign films. I’ve no real quibbles with anything in the top 25, but I find the high ranking of Wings of Desire at #41 inexplicable. This movie is perhaps the art-house version of The Princess Bride or The Gods Must Be Crazy in its overratedness.

I agree with many of Copeland’s committee that the Kieslowski Three Colors trilogy should be considered as one movie, not three: the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Here’s an edited version of the note that I sent Copeland, with my picks:

I think that I have seen about 40% of the films on the list, albeit some of them not since college. Many of them are perfectly good, but I’m not sure that I would give them a 1-25 ranking. So here are my top 12…, including a few write-ins:

#1 M, Fritz Lang [#3 on the Copeland list]
#2 The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Demy [#65]
#3 Three Colors: Red, Kieslowski [#39]
#4 Three Colors: Blue, Kieslowski [#62]
#5 Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Almodovar — write-in
#6 Ran, Kurosawa [#16]
#7 Repulsion, Roman Polanski — write-in
#8 The Conformist, Bertolucci [#18]
#9 Three Colors: White, Kieslowski [did not make the Copeland cut]
#10 The Vanishing, Sluizer [did not make the Copeland cut]
#11 Open Hearts, Susanne Bier — write-in
#12 Fantastic Planet, Rene Laloux — write-in

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring, Ki-duk Kim, should also be on the list, but I don’t think it meets your release-year criterion.

The voting has served as a prod to get Das Boot and Jules and Jim onto my Netflix queue.

Via Arts & Letters Daily: Richard Schickel gives a new reading of the American film noir cycle:

film noir… was directing our attention backward, not forward. After the war, we were not so much disillusioned by our prospects as giddily illusioned by them, and the message of film noir was curiously at odds with the national mood.

Terrence Rafferty previews Film Forum’s N.Y.C. Noir series, which kicks off with Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success:

…the way [J.J.] Hunsecker drags the movie’s protagonist, an overeager press agent named Sidney Falco…, down into the ethical sewer with him is as brutal as what Richard Widmark does to the old lady in Henry Hathaway’s Kiss of Death (1947)….

It’s the nakedness of the newspaperman’s exercise of power, and the inability of the other, less monomaniacal characters to fight it, that make the picture unmistakably noir, even without gunplay. A sense of powerlessness — often disguised by tough-guy bravado — is a common trait in the heroes and heroines of film noir, and this is a feeling that New Yorkers know a thing or two about. We know too that the threat of physical violence is far from the only means the masters of our fates employ when they want us to know there’s no way out. In this dirty town, where people come to Make It, our desire to succeed and our terror of failure are usually all the ammunition the powerful require to keep us right where they want us.