WEIRDLAND: Bonnie & Clyde miniseries, "Gun Crazy" inspired-opera, "Side Effects" (neo noir)

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Bonnie & Clyde miniseries, "Gun Crazy" inspired-opera, "Side Effects" (neo noir)

Holliday Grainger will play Bonnie Parker

Holliday Grainger and Emile Hirsch will play the infamous bank-robbing couple Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow in Bonnie & Clyde, Lifetime/History’s four-hour miniseries directed by Oscar-nominated helmer Bruce Beresford and produced by Sony Pictures TV and Craig Zadan and Meron’s Storyline Entertainment. They join Oscar winners Holly Hunter and William Hurt, who were recently cast in the project.

Emile Hirsch will play Clyde Barrow

Written by John Rice and Joe Batteer, the mini is based on the true story of Clyde Barrow (Hirsch), a charismatic convicted armed robber who sweeps Bonnie Parker (Grainger), an impressionable, petite, small-town waitress, off her feet, and the two embark on one one of most infamous bank-robbing sprees in history. Hunter will play Bonnie’s mother Emma Parker; Hurt plays Frank Hamer, the Texas Ranger credited with tracking down and killing Bonnie and Clyde. Source: www.deadline.com

“Don Giovanni” runs Friday evening and Sunday afternoon in the Brown Theater. Directed by Kristine McIntyre, this production updates the staging with a set and costumes inspired by 1950s film noir. “Here we find a morally corrupted antihero, an emotionally scarred femme fatale, and a conclusion that is destined to come but resolves nothing for those who remain standing," says Roth. "Add an inescapable past of the antihero plus an urban setting in the darkest hour of night and you have basically film noir.” To fans of film noir, that rings a bell. The Louisville Film Society partners with the opera Wednesday night with a film noir double feature at the Dreamland Film Center (810 East Market St.).

The double feature spotlights the Bonnie and Clyde-style "couple on the run" subgenre, with Nicholas Ray's seminal 1948 film "They Live By Night" and Joseph H. Lewis's "Gun Crazy," a 1950 melodrama about a World War II veteran and a carnival sharpshooter who embark on a crime spree.

Peggy Cummins as Annie Laurie Starr in "Gun Crazy" (1950) directed by Joseph H. Lewis

The dramatic black and white tones of noir make an interesting pairing with the soaring highs and lows of classical opera. Imagine a glorious soprano singing "Gun Crazy" Annie Laurie Starr's lines: "I told you I was no good. I didn't kid you, did I? Well, now you know. But I've been kicked around all my life. From now on I'm going to start kicking back." Source: www.wfpl.org

Steven Soderbergh's new film Side Effects is mostly an engine for delivering Very Surprising Plot Twists. A big part of the way it does that is by switching up a kind of movie-of-the-week problem film (the struggles with depression; the pathos of a spouse returning from prison) with noir. So you go from female-friendly melodrama (with a female protagonist) to female-loathing noir (with a male protagonist). Noir and its attendant misogyny aren't really the point, in other words; they're just a byproduct of Soderbergh's rage for cleverness. A side effect, if you will.

Still, as the film makes clear, side effects—even ersatz ones—can matter quite a bit. In this case, a lot of the damage is not so much to the woman in the film as to the male lead, Jonathan Banks (Jude Law). Banks is supposed to be a caring, talented hard-working psychiatrist, with a loving wife and child.

But then his depressed patient, Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara) goes off the rails spectacularly—and everything Banks has worked for collapses. His practice, his professional reputation, even his family disintegrate around him.

Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in "The Big Sleep" (1946) directed by Howard Hawks

Misogyny is, at least, attention. Chandler and noir may loathe women, but at least that means they think women are important. The Last Seduction makes Linda Fiorentino into a hyperbolic evil bitch goddess—but at least she gets to have the fun of being a hyperbolic evil bitch goddess. Side Effects, on the other hand, reaches into noir for its fascinating, deadly women—and then myopically insists that we pledge our allegiance instead to a standard Hollywood male protagonist and his reservoirs of oleaginous self-absorption.

Noir is terrified of feminization and powerful women —which means, in part, that it is able to conceive of, and even perhaps at times to point towards, both of those things. Side Effects, in contrast, borrows some tropes from noir, but they're chewed to nothing in the remorseless grinding of the plot. In the end, we're left, not with noir or with misogyny, but simply with the complacent smirk that signals that once again the good guy who is a guy gets to live happily ever after. Source: www.theatlantic.com

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