Oprah Movie Club Pick for June: Blue Velvet

1986 neo-noir thriller

Rating: 17/20

Plot: Jeffrey, home from college because his father is hospitalized after a stroke, finds a severed ear while throwing rocks at a trash can. He takes it to a detective, but he and the detective's daughter decide to do a little sleuthing on their own. They uncover a sinister world of kidnapping, sexual depravity, and Roy Orbison lip-synching routines. Soon, Jeffrey is up to his nipples in shadows.

It's been suggested that Jeffrey's story is a neo-noir exploration of the Oedipus Complex, that Dennis Hopper's Frank is an abusive father figure, and Rossellini's Dorothy represents the mother. (See Fetishism and Curiosity by Laura Mulvey--Chapter Nine is all about this and can be found [mostly] online.) It's an interesting idea, but I couldn't get through the entire chapter either because I'm too lazy or not smart enough or some combination of the two. For me, Blue Velvet is really straightforward, perhaps Lynch's easiest movie to digest. It's still Lynchian--sprinkled with his trademark dark quirkiness and horrifying outlook on sexuality and violence. Of course, according to imdb.com, there are also allusions to Lincoln's assassination, so maybe I'm not digging into this nearly enough. I don't buy the Lincoln stuff, however. A Lincoln Street? Frank's last name being Booth? Victim's shot through the head? Seems like a reach or two to me. Something else learned from the imdb.com trivia page: Lynch (during the filming) and later Rossellini both find the rape scene that Jeffrey watches from the closet funny. I find that extremely odd. I don't see any humor in that scene at all; in fact, I think it's one of the more horrifying moments in film. I've always thought Lynch and I had similar senses of humor.

Anyway, this is a movie about things that are submerged, things that either people don't know about because they're actually hidden or people just want to pretend to not know about. Or it's about mysteries and what happens when you're curious enough to start uncovering those mysteries--sociological mysteries as well as personal ones. "It's a strange world." Those words are said during several conversations between Kyle MacLachlan and the lovely Laura Dern's characters. Lynch never hides the strangeness in our world. In fact, he brings it to the focus in his movies, and that's one of the things that can make watching his movies a sometimes-uneasy experience. That submerged strangeness is shown metaphorically right at the beginning of Blue Velvet. There are shots of white picket fences, flowers, a guy watering his grass, and waving firemen to the saccharine crooning of "Blue Velvet" by Bobby Vinton. Suddenly--a gun on the television and a hose caught in a bush, the latter which I just typed and wondered if it was meant to be as dirty as it looks in words. And then insects snarling subterraneanly. Above, things are just peachy, but just below the surface, there's all sorts of nastiness. Look at MacLachlan's goofy character. He's nothing but innocent at the beginning of this thing. Hell, he tries to impress a high school senior with a story about the kid with "the biggest tongue in the world" and something called "the chicken walk." We don't see any evidence that there's anything darker going on with his character until he is in the nightclub watching Rossellini's character for the first time. Then, you see the lust on his face in a brilliantly acted scene. Just eyes, and you see everything start to unravel. Or maybe you don't if you're watching this for the first time. I don't know. Of course, earlier in the story, Jeffrey is plotting to break into a women's house, but there's still a kind of childish naiveté with that whole scheme. No, the sinister nature--submerged evil goop--in Jeffrey will be uncovered a bit later in the proceedings. Dennis Hopper's Frank Booth is the personification of that evil in society and maybe in all of us. And what a performance that is! There's a physicality to his character even when he's not moving, and each curse word he utters--and those are numerous--seems to pack more meaning than when I curse at people when I'm driving. And "I'll fuck anything that moves!" is one of my favorite lines/deliveries of all time. Hopper's at the height of his unhinged powers here. The great Jack Nance is in there, too, introducing himself as Paul multiple times and asking Jeffrey, "Have you ever been to pussy heaven?" Oh, and Brad Dourif. I like all the performances in this movie. They're the typical performances David Lynch usually gets in his movies, performances always threatening to completely cross the line into soap opera performances. They're performances that--almost thankfully--remind you that you're just watching a movie.

Other stuff:

Knife seduction--Lynch would have had to call in a double or stunt man for me, first because my naked rump is disturbing and covered with a layer of hair and second because I would have gotten to excited, lunged at Rossellini, and been stabbed. It would have been a Brandon Lee end to my career.

Oil drill shadows spotlighted on a brick wall. This doesn't have much unusual imagery. There's a guy with a gas mask, a few random shots of candles, and, of course, the severed ear with ants crawling all over it. But Lynch deliberately uses a spotlight to throw the shadow of an oil drill on the wall. I guess it must be important. Digging? Sexual symbolism (i.e. being drilled)? Something else?

There are references to logs or logging, and the town's called Lumberton. It really made me miss the presence of the Log Lady.

Heineken product placement--the first time MacLachlan is drinking it, you could almost mistake the scene for a commercial. It's awkward.

A blind guy working in a hardware store--seems like throwaway stuff. Is there anything deeper with this character?

"I have your disease in me now." I'm not sure if that's hot or creepy.

"Yes, that's a human ear all right." For whatever reason, that makes me laugh. Either the detective doubted that Jeffrey knew what a human ear looked like or he didn't believe him.

There's a song that plays when MacLachlan and Dern's characters tell each other they love each other--"Mysteries of Love" apparently, lyrics about how "Sometimes the wind blows"--and it might be the worst thing I've ever heard in my life. And I can't figure out why anybody would play that at a party unless they were trying to clear the room. It's Julee Cruise singing to Angelo Badalamenti's music. Badalamenti's the piano player in this, by the way. I like a lot of what Badalamenti did here, especially during the title credits where the work could almost be mistake for something Bernard Herrmann did. But this "Mysteries of Love" song is the worst thing ever.

I could have done without Mike, Sandy's boyfriend. I guess something needed to happen so that Rossellini's can wander into the background completely naked, but that pretty great scene could have been completely terrific without that distracting little subplot that didn't need to be there.

Dern discusses her dreams, talking about how it was dark because there weren't any robins. Of course, Hopper refers to it being "dark" a couple different times, too. MacLachlan's response is a beautiful "You're a neat girl" to which she responds, "So are you." Just beautiful. Those crazy kids living in this messed-up world. I sure hope they make it.

Detour

1945 film noir

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A piano player on his way across country to visit his girlfriend in Los Angeles runs into some trouble after the man he hitches a ride with dies. The piano player assumes his identity and picks up a really mean passenger.

Such a fascinating little movie. On the one hand, it looks really cheap and the characters are generic. Edgar G. Ulmer directed the thing on a nothing budget in just six days. Tom Neal is awfully whiny as our protagonist and narrator and lacks punch, but he's an acceptable dupe. Ann Savage with her "homely natural beauty" is a vicious little bitch, squeezing pulpy insults out the sides of her mouth ("Kiss him with a wrench," "You'll pop into jail so fast it'll give you the bends") and bringing the feisty a little too hard. He's mopey and she's nasty, but together, they approach something close to noir magic with their hateful exchanges that dominate the second half of this movie.And Ulmer does a whole lot with his little. This storytelling's got lots of style with all these sneaky voyeuristic camera movements, hazy exteriors, a great use of shadows and light, and a terrific scene following a death with an in-and-out-of-focus glance around the room. With an interesting though less-than-plausible plot and a handful of damned characters, some who even realize they're damned, this is pretty far from perfect but still a good example of the genre made during its golden era. I would have preferred a less obvious ending, however. This should have ended with a shot of the protagonist walking on the shoulder of a highway, a lost doomed soul completely alone. It's too bad the lost doomed soul had to be arrested at the end because this movie was made in 1945.

Note: I'm surprised film noir classics I watched as a toddler didn't turn me into a smoker. I almost want to start smoking now so that I can talk with a cigarette in my mouth like characters like Al do. How did these movies not turn me into a smoker when I was a lot more impressionable?

Keyhole

2011 Guy Maddin movie

Rating: 12/20

Plot: Gangster Ulysses Pick and his gang take refuge in Pick's home. The police have the place surrounded. Accompanying Pick are a tied-up and gagged young man and a drowned woman. While his men bicker, Pick and the two companions venture through the house in search of his wife. They talk to some ghosts and see a penis or two.

Even a bad Guy Maddin film is going to have enough originality and cool visuals to make it worth the time. This is a clash of all kinds of ideas, but it never feels very complete or even all that coherent. It's more like thumbing through Maddin's notepad which is fun in spots and frustrating in others. It's definitely a weird movie although Maddin claimed it was his effort to make "pure narrative." The nods to silent cinema are still present, but this is shot more traditionally and has a lot of dialogue. I think the less dialogue in Maddin's movies, the better. Anyway, there's a ton going on--a noirish gangster tale, a ghost story, a psychological investigation, a surreal dream playground, light science fiction, and maybe the retelling of a myth. It's a lot to take in, and most people are going to think it's just a little too pretentious. But it's a silly pretentious, not a stuffy pretentious with Maddin his usual playful self. In this, you get naked old guy genitalia, backwards talking, weird moving lights, characters speaking to each other in different languages, undergarments with phallic doodles, wallpapering, symbolic green bowls, a bicycle-powered electric chair, a crowded tub, secret tunnels with a "Cyclops ahead" warning turning out to be a glory hole, old man stump licking, weird antique toys, wallpaper love, Mexican banditos, Kids in the Hall alum Kevin McDonald attempting to sodomize a ghost, and a narrator who says cool things like "You don't even recognize your own son, Ned--Milk-drinking Ned." Oh, and a guy in a closet who plays Yahtzee. A lot of the dreamlike visuals are really cool, but that can only take you so far and this ends up dragging a little and frustrating a lot. It's not where I'd start with Guy Maddin's work if I were you.

Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid

1982 comedy

Rating: 13/20

Plot: A woman believes the death of her father, a noted scientist and cheesemaker, was murder and hires shamus Rigby Reardon for the case. He uncovers a bunch of mysterious goings-on, some which even make a little sense.

I have mixed feelings about this one because although director Carl Reiner has created it with a good understanding of the films he's spoofing and it really is a clever idea, it's just not very funny at all. The title is actually one of the funniest things about the movie, and I would definitely put this more in the "cute" or "clever" category than "hysterical." The dialogue that is created with characters from classic noir, Marlowe included, makes sense most of the time, but it just isn't funny. Aside from Bogart in, I think, three different movies, this plunders scenes from movies with shane-movies favorite Vincent Price, Charles Laughton, Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Veronica Lake, Bette Davis, Alan Ladd, Barbara Stanwyck, Ray Milland, Ava Gardner, and Burt Lancaster. It's a clever idea even if none of it made me laugh. The best thing about it is how Edith Head, in what was apparently her final film, matched the costumes in this to the originals. I watched this while in the middle of a reading of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, and I appreciated the nod to some of the language of that, especially the oft-goofy figurative language used by that author. Of course, I got the biggest kick out of the line "Start the whoopie machine" which I'm going to now preface all of my love-making, assuming I ever have sexual intercourse again, with. I also appreciated the allusion to my birthplace of Terre Haute, Indiana. Steve Martin poked fun at Terre Haute back in the day, but I can forgive him for that. He's really good as the centerpiece for this typically confusing noirish tale. His performance has just the right mix of goof and straight, and he's got the right face and build for a noir detective.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to start the whoopie machine. (Note: I am not really about to have sexual intercourse.)

Double Indemnity

1944 noir classic

Rating: 20/20

Plot: A horny insurance guy meets a dame (I think that's what they were called back then) with gams (I think that's what they were called back then) that don't quit and decides to help her kill her husband in order to impress her.

Sorry to tell you this, but if you don't like this movie, you just don't like movies. True, you could probably say that about every Fred MacMurray movie that doesn't involve him turning into a dog. I remember seeing this for the first
time after knowing MacMurray only for The Shaggy Dog and the Flubber movie and having no idea he could be this cool. I guess we can't give credit to MacMurray for these gems though:

"I couldn't hear my own footsteps. It was the walk of a dead man."
"How could I have known that murder could sometimes smell like honeysuckle?"
"I wanted to see her again. . .without the silly staircase between us."

No, Raymond Chandler gets credit for those. I'll give MacMurray credit and possibly a lifetime achievement award for the way he lights a match though. I dig everything about this movie, from title credits with the approaching shadowy figure to the Stanwyck's terrible wig. A slow-moving train, a hide behind a doorway, excessive perspiration, the A-ha look that Edward G. Robinson has in his eyes throughout the entire movie. Double Indemnity is probably the purest example of noir storytelling, all Venetian blinds and femme fatales and shadows, and although it's reportedly Ass Masterson's 7th favorite movie of all time, it's impossible not to see it as the classic that it is. jHe probably just likes it because none of the characters are happy at the end though. This picture of depravity, greed, and horniness is just perfection.

Lost Highway

1997 psychological nightmare

Rating: 15/20

Plot: A jealous guy meets a creepy pale guy at a party and then either murders his wife or doesn't murder his wife. He probably does. While in jail for the crime, he transforms into a mechanic and makes a series of decisions that are probably going to get him into some trouble. There's the creepy pale guy again. Cue backward explosion! Marilyn Manson! And cut.

I think David Lynch's last three movies were made as some sort of test. This, Inland Empire, Mulholland Drive. I've not really had the urge to see any of them again unlike Eraserhead which I could watch once a week. These three are a test on the senses, perplexing and frustrating riddles, clumsy nightmares. Thinking about any of those three movies--a trilogy? They are linked thematically, right?--kind of gives me a headache actually. They're so dark, so dismal and hopeless. The non-linear approach is fine, but Lost Highway seems to almost break its own rules, and Lynch creates this world that very few people will want to enter and fewer will want to stick around in. Neo-psycho-noir, blacker than black. It's not always entertaining even though there are some things you kind of want to laugh at and other things that you'll never forget (that conversation with the creepy pale guy at the party is as terrifying as dialogue gets). This starts with Scott Walker, by the way, so that's cool. And Richard Pryor's in it, only he doesn't look so good. His best moment: "There are nine people down here. I'll let you ask seven of them, and if you can get that price from one of them, I'll let you ask the other two." My very favorite moment though is probably getting to watch Mr. Eddy's road rage. Ultimately, I think this a movie about movies, but I'm not completely sure, and I wouldn't feel comfortable talking about this movie in a bar. It's as fascinating a two-plus hours as you'll get with a feature film, but I can't say it's entirely pleasurable. Either something is wrong with David Lynch or something is wrong with the human mind in general. I'm guessing it's the latter.

The Element of Crime

1984 futurist noir

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Detective Fisher comes back to Europe after an extended stay in Egypt to help solve a series of murders. He meets with his old mentor and uses his book, The Element of Crime, to try to crack the case.

I'm really amazed that this is somebody first movie. Not that it's thoroughly enjoyable or even really all that coherent, at least after one viewing, but it's got the wankery of a seasoned veteran of movie directing. Influenced heavily by some of cinema's most daring farts, von Trier (a Nazi) still manages to make something completely unique. It's a visual thrill although the story's a bit of a clunker, all these weirdly-lit shots that look like they could have come from a 30s Carl Theodor Dreyer movie. This also recalls Alphaville a bit, a dreamier and more pretentious (if you can believe it) Godard sci-fi noir for your mind's stink eye. But after a while, my tired mind wandered pretty far away from the center of this one as I had trouble following what was going on exactly. The allure or novelty of the visual flavor of The Element of Crime wore off, and there just wasn't enough story or character to cling to. It's worth watching if you're into the artsy-fartsy scene, but this will likely frustrate anybody who's used to normal movies.

Lights in the Dusk

2006 Aki Kaurismaki movie

Rating: 15/20

Plot: The most pathetic man on earth, a security guard in Helsinki, falls for a blond gal who he doesn't realize is way out of his league. They begin dating, but it turns out she's only using him so that she and another guy can steal jewelry from the mall where Koistenin works. Meanwhile, a woman who Koistenin purchases hot dogs from wonders why he isn't interested in her.

Getting to see an Aki Kaurismaki movie has become like a special ocassion for me. This is Kaurismaki attempting noir, complete with the biggest dupe for a protagonist you'll likely find, a pretty nasty femme fatale, and lots and lots of smoking. The camera floats a little more in this than in some of Kaurismaki's earlier work, but the style hasn't changed much. Things still crawl along at a snail's pace (but in a good way!), slowly enough to frustrate most folks used to watching movies with scenes where stuff actually happens. That's what I like about these movies though. You really get to appreciate the nuances of these quirky, mostly sad and desperate characters. Kaurismaki's characters aren't exactly rushing through life, really making Finland seem like the lethargic place on the planet, and it would almost seem unnatural to see them do much of anything. In fact, it's almost shocking to see any of his characters moving around much at all. The jewel thieving probably has the most rapid movements, and it's shot so that you don't even really see the characters. Another scene involves our protagonist and three burlier fellows taking it outside, and the director chooses to not have the camera go outside at all. Instead, he focuses on a swinging door and, once it stops swinging, just a door. Then, the three burlier fellows come back in, just as we expected they would. It's sad and it's humorous, and that's just what's really awesome about these movies, their ability to be both simultaneously. I don't want to say bittersweet because it would sound like a cliche. I think the only appropriate adjective is Kaurismakian. By the way, this has a poignant sweet ending, the sort of ending that you learn to expect from this guy, so it's not all despairing over the miserable existence of a true loser.

Somebody needs to make this guy's movies more widely available. One a year. That's all I'm asking for.

Deadfall

1993 Coppola film

Rating: 7/20

Plot: Joe accidentally kills his own father and partner in con during a scam. His father's last words hint that his twin brother, an Uncle Lou that Joe didn't even know about, may have stolen from him years earlier. "My brother took the cake. My brother took the cake." Bleh sound. Blood spit. Dead. When Joe travels to meet Uncle Lou and see about fulfilling his father's last wishes, he meets his Cousin Eddy and gets wrapped up in a dangerous con game.

OK, it's not that Coppola. It's those Coppolas, assuming you're willing to count one Nicolas Cage as a Coppola. More on him in a minute. Director Christopher Coppola proves that sometimes the apple can fall very very far away from the tree with this inept piece of filmmaking that he wrote and directed. Sure, he gives you enough neo-noir twists and turns to keep you guessing, but there are some genuinely head-scratching moments and maybe even ball-scratching moments that made me suspect this was actually some genius black comedy. Exhibit A: a scene with a lobster claw. Exhibit B: the acting, which just can't be this bad accidentally considering you've got some talented people involved. James Coburn gets to be not all that good twice. Charlie Sheen brings his tiger's blood and Adonis DNA to a very small role as a pool shark. The weakest link in this rusty chain of a movie is probably Michael Biehn, uninspired as the noir anti-hero. The narration is especially bad, but it brings up an important question--is it the chicken bad script or the egg bad acting that's the problem? My best guess is that it's a combination of both. This also suffers from a constant barrage of string music that really got on my nerves.

But then we come to what makes this movie worth watching and, along with the abysmal The Room, one of the funniest things I've seen in a long, long time: a deliriously unhinged Nicolas Coppola. I've seen Cage performances where he spends large portions of the movie unglued (Bad Lieutenant) or movies where he's just terrible (The Wicker Man) and movies where he's a little of both. Ghost Rider? But I don't have any idea how to describe this. And I'm not sure why Christopher Coppola allowed him to play his character this way with some really odd wardrobe choices that Cage apparently picked out himself, this weird mumbly accent thing, and the most over-the-top line delivery I have ever seen. When Cage is on the screen, you completely forget about the story and the other characters. It almost feels like you're watching a normal movie, say a really bad remake of Double Indemnity or something, and Cage barges into your house, smashes your television with a sledge hammer, and then starts dancing in your living room. He's like the class clown of the movie, distracting from what the teacher's trying to do, and I really wonder if he wanted his brother (I think?) to fail and did it all on purpose. I think it's got to have something to do with drugs though because a Nic Cage freak out of these proportions can't happen organically. I've often written about a Nic Cage movie having a Nic Cage moment or two. This is bursting with Nic Cage moments--the macho waving of the "We're Number One" hand signal, the triple fuck delivered when his car won't start, the rapid hollering of classic lines like "What am I? A fucking retard, man? Huh?", the inexplicable weird sidewalk dance that he does in one scene, the raw delivery of a normally innocuous line like "Would you like a piece of gum?" that transforms it into something really menacing, the way he drinks from a beer bottle after this unnatural dancing gait he uses to perambulate a strip joint, his snorting laugh, the longest fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck I think I've ever heard in a movie, his overuse of what I guess was a catchword of some kind ("Mommy"), the overall cadence, scenes where his voice changes into this high-pitched whine, "OK, baby girl. . . who sent ya?", a moment when he screams that somebody tried to kill him and follows it with an angry karate kick, the Tasmanian Devil growls he makes as he cries and humps a bed. It's mayhem, but career-defining mayhem if Nic Cage wants to be known as the most insane actor of all time. It's really a performance that has to be seen in order to be believed. Even then, you probably won't believe it. It'll make you say "Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!" though.

Brick

2005 neo-noir

Rating: 13/20

Plot: Brenden finds his ex-girlfriend murdered a couple days after a cryptic phone conversation with her. With the help of a buddy, he tries to find her killer, uncovering a high school drug ring and getting beaten up numerous times.

Not a bad idea. Nor is it poorly acted. I like that Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and there's not really a weak link amongst his supporting cast. The dialogue's thick with noirish cliche, maybe too thick. I don't mind the dialogue of a movie wiping away any chance at realism, but since there was nothing unrealistic about the look or feel of the story, it almost clashed. Neither the story nor its characters were really all that interesting, and after half the movie had ended, the novelty of the dialogue wore off and I was left wondering how many times I'd get to see Gordon-Levitt punched, probably because he has too many names. This is the type of movie that I'll see on the blog at the end of the year and not really remember.

Red Rock West

1993 Nicolas Cage movie

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Mike's down on his luck, a guy who can't get a drilling job because of a bad leg or afford to gas up his car. With five bucks left in his tattered wallet, he sputters into Red Rock, a town of 1,522 people. At the local watering hole, the proprietor (Wayne) mistakes him for a guy named Lyle and hints that there's a job for him. Mike, as desperate as they come, goes along with it and discovers that the job involves making the population of Red Rock 1,521 people by killing Wayne's whore of a wife. Being an honest guy, Mike tries to do nearly the right thing, but he finds himself in a pretty big mess anyway.

You're guaranteed to get at least one Nicolas Cage Moment in every Nicolas Cage movie. A Nicolas Cage Moment, in case you don't know, is when the character he happens to be playing starts acting like Nicolas Cage, doing things that only Nicolas Cage could or would do. Some movies (The Wicker Man, Bad Lieutenant) have multiple Nicolas Cage Moments. In Red Rock West, you get the Nicolas Cage Moment early on during a scene where he overreacts because he's low on gas. He punches the ceiling, like only Nicolas Cage would, and does this head-roll-while-moaning thing to show his frustration. Earlier in the movie, you get to see him do a one-armed push-up, and, for anybody who hasn't already realized it, he demonstrates what a sexual monster he is in the simple act of pumping gas, a simple act that Nicolas Cage Nicolas Cages like only Nicolas Cage can Nicolas Cage. He's pretty good in this, and it's entertaining watching his character, a genuinely good guy as proven in earlier scenes where he's honest about an injured leg and passes up the opportunity to grab a handful of cash and run, slip and slide into this hopeless situation. The more he tries to do right, the more he finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. He almost gets out a few times, but you just know there's going to be yet another shot of that "Red Rock population 1,522" sign. The second half of the movie is dominated by the actual Lyle played by an unhinged Dennis Hopper. It would have been fun to see Dennis Hopper at his wackiest in the same movie with Nicolas Cage at his most Nicolas Cage. Not sure about Lara Flynn Boyle as the femme fatale, but she is a cutie. The story threatens to spiral out of control, straddling that line between completely ludicrous and whatever is on the other side of completely ludicrous, but it's a well paced and consistently entertaining example of modern noir. The ending caught me off guard.

Nicolas Cage synchronicity: As I finished typing this, a Drive Angry commercial came on.

Out of the Past

1947 noir classic

Rating: 18/20

Plot: Detective-for-hire Jeff Bailey's attempting to live a quiet life in a do-nothing town, working at a gas station and dating a nice girl. A mysterious man from his past pops up and yanks Bailey back into his less-prosaic days. While driving with his girlfriend to meet Whit Sterling, he fills her in on his backstory, telling about the time he was hired by Whit Sterling to find estranged girlfriend Kathie Moffat, a woman who shot him a couple times in the abdomen before her departure. He finds her, and although she seems like the type of gal who could shoot him in the abdomen a couple times and then depart, he starts nailing her. Sexually, I mean. And since Robert Mitchum is in the movie, things don't work out so well after that.

Speaking of sex, this movie has a great 1940's sex scene. Mitchum and seductive Greer flee a rainstorm on a beach (interestingly [and symbolically], backdropped with all these nets) and go back to her place. He kisses her on the neck, the lights go out, the camera pans to the right, and the blustery night pushes the door wide open. Damn! Is that hot or what? Mitchum's great as usual as the doomed protagonist, a guy who, no matter how good he is at his job, is going to wind up dead by the end of the movie. He's one of the few actors who can have this layer of machismatic confidence not quite hiding a layer of doomed resignation. His performance fools the viewer into thinking the guy's in control of a situation that he just has no control over. What a face that Mitchum has. Greer's perfect as the femme fatale. From the moment she appears on the screen (a great shot with a great line, a line paralleled a few scenes later, that goes with it), you no that she's no good. And there's Kirk Douglas again, his character a nice contrast to what Mitchum's got going on. Director Jacques Tourneur, a Frenchman, uses light and dark and shadows and symbols to tell this story, one that grows more and more complex as it goes until it's so muddy that you have to pause and give your mind time to catch up a bit. This is nearly noir perfection, from the first appearance of Sterling's darkly-dressed thug at the beginning to the expression of the deaf kid at the end.

Shane-movies trivia [Spoiler Alert!]: I think it would hurt to get shot in the groin.

Man Bait

1952 book store thriller

Rating: 12/20

Plot: A frequently tardy book store employee makes a date with a guy trying to shoplift a book. On their first date, they come up with a half-assed plan to blackmail her boss. It doesn't work out so well.

First off, here's an example of a movie with not only a misleading poster but a misleading title. Man Bait is a great title because it can be about a gorgeous woman who lures men to their doom in a noirish thriller or a tale about a demented fisherman who poisons homeless people to use pieces of their flesh as shark bait. Unfortunately, this is about as exciting as you'd expect from a movie that takes place almost entirely inside a dusty used book store. The first scene is actually a bunch of employees, far too many employees for this book store, arriving and getting ready to work. I spent the first ten minutes of the movie trying to figure out who the main characters were going to be. And those leads--the boss, the girl, the new boyfriend--are such boring characters that I actually began to long for more scenes of the others working in the book store. The blackmail scheme is not only uninspired and dull, but it's completely far-fetched. Trying to get money from the manager of a small book store that has way too many employees? It doesn't make sense, and the way things conveniently fall into place (actually, out of place would be more accurate since it's a blackmail scheme gone awry) is forced and silly. These people just aren't acting like people are supposed to act. Things pick up a bit after a key death, and there are a few nearly suspenseful moments in the final third of the movie, but by then, it's not salvageable.

The Postman Always Rings Twice

1946 noir

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Drifter Frank Chambers wanders into a Southern California town and takes a job as a handyman in a small restaurant, mostly because of how the proprietor's wife looks in her tiny white shorts. Soon enough, Frank and Cora are pawing at each other. Cora doesn't love Nick, her older husband, and she really wants to own and run the restaurant all by herself. Frank wants to continue sleeping with Cora. They decide to end Nick's life prematurely and live the dream. It doesn't go very well.

OK, I'm going to be in the minority with a lukewarm response to this one. But if somebody in the know told me that The Postman Always Rings Twice is a parody of film noir, I would snap my fingers and say, "Aha! I knew it!" So much about this is color-by-numbers noir. The characters are stock, the dialogue is riddled with cliches, and the couples' ploys and exploits are so unbelievably stupid, that there's no way they're a writer's honest attempt at crime fiction. I mean, just look at this bit of dialogue:

Cop: Cats are poor, dumb things.
Frank (with a goofy grin): Yeah. They don't know anything about electricity.
Cop: Killed her deader than a doornail.
D.A. :Yes, the cat's dead all right. Well, accidents can happen in the weirdest sort of ways.
Cop: Never saw a prettier cat. Killed her deader than a doornail.

On paper, that looks like it could have been penned by Ed Wood, and the actors deliver the lines like they think they're in one of his movies. Lana Turner looks the part, and her legs really steal the show, but her acting is brutal. I will say that the scene in which she's introduced (a rolling lipstick tube, those white shorts, some slyly suggestive banter) is easily the best scene in the movie. John Garfield's performance is definitely weirder and probably worse. He seems completely lost, an actor who doesn't understand where his character's coming from or where he's going, and his dialect comes and goes. From the swiftly blossoming romance between the two leads to the accelerating but stuttering dramatic moments, I didn't buy a single thing that happened in this movie. That didn't necessarily stop me from enjoying the film, but all that enjoyment came from this being comedy rather than straight noir.

The Man Who Wasn't There

2001 existential neo-noir

Rating: 17/20 (Jen: 18/20)

Plot: Ed cuts hair in his brother-in-law's barber shop. One day, he decides he's not content with his life after listening to a customer go on and on about plans to start a dry cleaning business. Ed decides to invest. The problem is that he doesn't have any money to invest. He comes up with a dumb plan, probably because he's a dumb guy, to blackmail his wife's boss. Things don't go as planned.

This is one of the best-looking black 'n' white movies I've ever seen. The Coen brothers sure know how to use blacks and whites, and their homage to noir is complete with twirling smoke from omnipresent cigarettes, dark shadows, gratuitous fedoras, and sharp contrasts. The Coens throw in all the elements of classic noir and just to keep things interesting, add UFO's into the mix. That genre's existential themes, here more obvious with repeated lines of dialogue and the sort-of narrated epilogue Billy Bob has, are also present here. With Ed, we've got a character who can't find his niche in the world, a character trying to mold some sort of existence for himself, a character who's lost and transient and directionless. And perhaps better than any other filmmakers, the Coens are able to incorporate imagery and symbolism to help nail down that theme, from the beginning shot of a rotating barbershop pole (of course, spiralling down and without the striking red and white) to the chair and razor at the end of the movie (a parallel image to the chairs and razors associated with Ed's profession) and all the numerous circles, hubcaps, lights and shadows, hair references, sonatas, and UFO 's in between. Thornton's deadpan performance is disarming. He's a man suffocated by his own existence, yet he seems oddly unaffected by the mess he's gotten himself in. Lots of faces familiar in the Coen universe, those typical oddball characters that inhabit their stories. I thought Frances McDormand was especially good, and Tony Shalhoub (not to be confused with Shooby Leboof) seemed like he was born to play the hotshot lawyer Freddy Riedenschneider. The story's got some left turns and it's not always clear exactly what's going on, but it's all told with such a remarkable visual flair and an abundance of style, that it doesn't really matter. It's not all noir moodiness and fatalistic despair either. I thought a lot of the movie was pretty funny, but there were times when I laughed or almost laughed and thought, perhaps because of the somber tone of the movie, that it was inappropriate, like (SPOILER ALERT!) in a car crash scene where a car flies absurdly across the screen. Like a lot of Coen bro movies, I can't quite put all the pieces to this haunted stroll through a barber's nightmare together, but it's definitely fun to meditate upon. I saw this way back when it came out and didn't remember it so well. I don't know why I'm surprised that I liked it as much as I do.

Body Heat

1981 noir retooling

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Ned Devine, a womanizing lawyer, is trying his best to sweat through a hotter-than-hot summer. He meets married and rich Matty Walker whose husband is conveniently out of town five days a week. They become friends and have many adventures together, mostly playing badminton. One sultry afternoon, Matty serves wildly, and the couple watch their last shuttlecock somersault right into the gutter. Oh, snap! Without a shuttlecock, they can't play badminton. They brainstorm substitute activities and finally decide on having sex and killing Matty's husband which, if you think about it, is a lot like badminton.

Here's my favorite thing about this movie: It is so reminiscent of other movies, borderline ordinary even. On the surface, it seems derivative, a modern update on noir. It's like somebody was carrying around a box of noir and accidentally dropped it down the stairs and all the noir shattered and scattered all over the place so the clumsy guy had to clean up the mess and piece it all back together and glued pieces together randomly and came up with Body Heat. That might sound like a bad thing, but in this case, I don't think it is. Although everything about Body Heat is familiar, I can't place exactly where I've seen any of it, although there's a whole lot of Double Indemnity. Oddly enough, the borrowing of ideas, moods, textures, and maybe even shots somehow makes this seem timeless. This is stylish, right from the opening shot of Hurt watching a fire from his hotel window. I really liked the jazzy score and the banter between Ned and Matty. I thought it was great how their "hookin' up" (or whatever the youngsters are calling it these days) was stretched out and developed, almost to the point where you were on the edge of your seat waiting for the couple to finally get naked. Steamy stuff, so steamy that I had to wipe off my glasses. There's also great mystery burbling beneath the action of this movie; you know something is askew although you can't quite figure out exactly what that is. There were a few awkward moments. The conversation the married couple and Ned have at the restaurant seems contrived, and I think every scene with the niece could have been deleted. I had questions about the random appearance of a clown, the use of the word "dorkus," and a strange scene where everybody in a room decides to smoke at the same time except for the flamboyant Ted Danson. I also had to rewind and pause one scene so that I could read the writing on a bathroom wall:

"Eat my shorts"
"Death to tourists"
"Sofa sucks"?
"Big Al eats here"
"Whip it good"
"Surf Punks"

This was a Cory recommendation.

The Killing

1956 crime drama

Rating: 18/20

Plot: A group of guys attempt to rob a horse racing track.

A great combination of a modern non-linear narrative structure, quality performances, a Jim Thompson-penned script, and a style that shows that Stanley Kubrick had decided to become Stanley Kubrick. The cinematography is great, and this is the type of movie you'll watch and actually notice the lighting. The Killing actually has only one real flaw but it's a major flaw--a Yucca-Flats-style narrator who functions sort of like a wrist watch in this. I did like the very realistic attention to detail, even when those details weren't exactly very realistic. It's tautness contributes to its greatness, too. With no bloating or anything cutesy, there's just not a wasted moment in this one.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

2005 neo-noir

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Professional thief Harry Lockhart dives into a movie audition to avoid arrest and winds up getting the part of a private detective. He attends a party where he runs into his childhood crush and meets Perry, a real private eye hired by the movie producers to let Harry tag along to see what the life is like. All three become involved in a murder mystery.

I suppose this is one of those cases where the story just doesn't matter all that much. The narrative is neither coherent or interesting, but the characters are colorfully cool and the dialogue is fresh. This has the pacing of a Lebowski which I like although it suffers from too many trendy touches and random stylistic dickery. I don't think Downey completely works as a narrator in this, but his character is likable in a sort of unlikable way. This is the type of story where you feel almost jerked around by the twists, like you're on a carnival Tilt-a-Wheel while wearing your trendiest jeans, but it's never in a way that induced either vertigo or vomiting. I just wish the tale was told with a little less gloss and glitter, maybe with one less "bang" in the title. It's a fun flick, but it needed some gristle.

Insomnia

1997 psychological thriller

Rating: 16/20

Plot: There are strange things done in the midnight sun. And one of those strange things north of the Arctic Circle in Norway is an author's murder of a 17-year-old. Swedish Jonas Engstrom and his partner Erik Vik arrive to investigate, but Jonas has to fight to stay sane following a second death, a barking dog, and relentless sunlight.

The detective side of this is overshadowed by the personal drama of the main character, a guy slowly losing his mind because of guilt, an ambiguous past, and his insomnia. And speaking of shadows, it's interesting that the movie is noirish while not having a single scene that takes place at night. No shadows, no gloomy evening. In fact, it's the exact opposite--bright lights, white fog, snow, and blinding morning. It's a good hook. There are a lot of scenes that are very well done in this. An early scene where the police chase the bad guy through the foggy Norwegian landscape is haunting and claustrophobic, and some jerky handheld camera work puts you right into the head of the nervous protagonist. There are lots of other fine, moody scenes. The story itself might be a bit pedestrian although I do like that you've got both a criminal mastermind character and a good guy who sort of has to become a criminal mastermind himself. I like when the good guys and bad guys interact or play little cat-and-mouse games, but the bad guy in this doesn't have all that much personality. Actually, the good guy doesn't either. Maybe that's the point though. Insomnia throws two normal Joes (or Svens) into situations where a few poor decisions tear their worlds to pieces. I've seen the American remake with Al Pacino, Robin Williams, and Hillary Swank. It was a while ago, but even though I thought that movie was pretty good, I think this original tops it.

The Narrow Margin

1952 train movie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A cop is assigned to escort a witness, the wife of a mobster, to Los Angeles via train.

Taut, suspenseful thriller that supports my theory that movies are better if they take place on trains. Part of me wishes this was longer although the other part of me thinks that the sub-80 minute length is just about perfect. This is stylish without being overtly stylish, and I especially liked the lack of soundtrack (the train noises being a suitable substitution) and camera work which made it impossible to ignore the closed-in spaces the good guys and bad guys were forced to share. Both gave the story a sense of realism that the occasional goofy acting and silly plot twists couldn't take away from. A nice crisp story with some clever dialogue and good characters. One question though: Why does the cop spend so much time wandering around the train? Wouldn't the woman have been a lot safer if he had just stayed with her behind locked doors the entire time?

A WR recommendation.