Fred MacMurray & June Haver video

Fred MacMurray & June Haver video. Soundtrack: "Paradise" and "It's All Yours" by Artie Shaw & Helen Forrest, "My Ideal" by Glenn Miller Orchestra, and "I'm gonna love you too" by Buddy Holly

Prisoners - Official Trailer #2: Jake Gyllenhaal & Hugh Jackman

Award-winning filmmaker Denis Villeneuve (Incendies) directs a deep ensemble cast in Prisoners, about two families whose lives are upturned when their young daughters go missing together.

Hugh Jackman, Maria Bello, Terrence Howard, and Viola Davis play the distraught parents, with Jake Gyllenhaal as a cop trying to pick up the missing girls’ trail. Paul Dano and Melissa Leo also star in the drama written by Aaron Guzikowski. Source: www.deadline.cm

Happy Anniversary, Billy Wilder! (Thoughts on Double Indemnity)

Fred MacMurray & Barbara Stanwyck on the set of "Double Indemnity" (1944) directed by Billy Wilder


A clip from "Double Indemnity" (1944) directed by Billy Wilder, starring Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, and Edward G. Robinson.

In the classic noir plot, the hero quite coincidentally meets the alluring femme fatale—in Double Indemnity he happens to pass by her villa and enters to ask her husband to renew a car insurance policy. Yet their meeting follows the fateful logic of a love at first sight. As Mladen Dolar notes, what seemingly happened unintentionally and by pure chance is belatedly recognized as the realization of an innermost wish: 'the pure chance was actually no chance at all: the intrusion of the unforeseen turned into necessity.'

From the moment the hero catches sight of the femme fatale, both find themselves caught in a sequence of events which can go only one way. Both are tragically framed within a narrative of fate and can only come to accept the law of causation.

As Joan Copjec argues, in order to indemnify himself against the dangers of sexuality, the noir hero treats her as his double, to which he surrenders the fatal enjoyment he cannot himself sustain. On the other hand, the femme fatale is more than simply a symptom of the hero’s erotic ambivalence. She sustains his selfdelusion, but also gives voice to a feminine desire that may include him in order to attain its aim, but also exceeds his fantasy realm. In her insistence that “it’s straight down the line for both” of them, she can be understood as moving towards an ethical act meant to radically undercut the blindness of self-preservation her lover seeks to entertain at all costs.

Owing to this function of duplicity within noir narratives, Slavoj Zizek suggests that the femme fatale functions as a symptom of the noir hero’s fatal enjoyment in such a way that, by destroying her—Walter Neff will shoot Phyllis Dietrichson in the heart—he hopes to purify himself of the desire she inspired and the guilt this entailed. In so doing, however, the noir hero not only does not recognize her as separate from him (thus denying her humanity), but also remains blind to the encrypted message about the fragility of his existence that she embodies for him.

Double Indemnity has come to figure as the prototype of film noir, not least of all because it performs the rhetorical duplicity connected to the femme fatale, staging Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) both as the symptom of Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) and as a female subject who will not give way and thus exceeds his narrative of the fatal consequences of their mutual transgression.

We only hear the confession he makes to his superior Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) after having shot his partner in crime; a self-justifying narrative, establishing the tragic code of failure. It begins with the statement, “I killed Dietrichson. I killed him for money and for a woman. I didn’t get the money and I didn’t get the woman. Pity isn’t it,” and continues as a voice-over throughout the film. Yet, at key moments in the fatal sequence resulting in the production of two corpses, Wilder also offers close-ups of Phyllis’s face, visually articulating a different perspective than that of her noir lover.

“No, I never loved you nor anybody else. I’m rotten to the heart. I used you just as you said, until a minute ago, when I couldn’t fire that second shot. I never thought that could happen to me.” One could read this as a gesture of abdication, because at this moment she actually stops her seductive game to see both her lover and herself. She acknowledges him by directly acknowledging how she had used him, and, in so doing, she asks for him to attend to her. By killing her rather than putting himself in her presence, he hopes to repress both his own desire for destruction as well as his complicity with her. That she, in turn, willingly accepts the death he is giving her not only renders visible the incompatibility of their two fantasy scenarios. It also allows us to decide whether we will privilege Walter Neff’s misogynist description of the femme fatale in his voice-over narrative, or recognize her as a separate human being, exceeding his appropriation of her and, in so doing, exhibiting an agency of her own.

According to Janey Place, film noir should be read as a “male fantasy” and the femme fatale, as the mythic “dark lady, the spider woman, the evil seductress who tempts man and brings about his destruction” and who has been haunting our image repertoire since Eve and Pandora. So that, even though she is punished in the end, her transgressions against masculine authority —killing her husband, cheating the insurance company, bringing about the demise of her disloyal lover— is what tarries in our memory. As Sylvia Harvey notes, “Despite the ritual punishment of acts of transgression, the vitality with which these acts are endowed produces an excess of meaning which cannot finally be contained. Narrative resolutions cannot recuperate their subversive significance.” Within feminist film criticism, the femme fatale has thus emerged as a fundamentally unstable figure.

Not only will she not allow herself to be dominated by the men who fall for her charms, but also the meaning she assumes in any given text refuses to be fixed. In the same manner that she will not assume an unequivocal place in the fantasy life of the noir hero, no single interpretation can be imposed on the disturbance posed by her resilient feminine power. -"Femme Fatale — Negotiations of Tragic Desire" (2004) by Elisabeth Bronfen

"Repeat Performance" (full movie): a cross between noir genre & Twilight Zone

Repeat Performance (1947) directed by Alfred L. Werker, starring Louis Hayward, Joan Leslie, Virginia Field, Richard Basehart, Tom Comway, etc.

Film noir and The Twilight Zone have more in common than you'd probably think. B-movie actors from the 40s peppered the casts of Twilight Zone episodes almost 20 years later. Dutch angles magnify tension; and other impressive black and white photography (at least before the Twilight Zone started to shoot on video late in the series) on the CBS show could easily be mistaken for a classic noir. Watch the credits at the end of a TZ and you'll see many names sometimes associated with film noir: Harry J. Wild, Joseph LaShelle, John Brahm, Richard Florey to name a few. Of course the fantasy/sci-fi element of the Twilight Zone are usually not found in noirs. The exceptions being Val Lewton's RKO horror films and the New Years Eve thriller, Repeat Performance.

Repeat Performance was released in 1947 by Eagle-Lion films who at the time were trying to establish themselves as a major force in Hollywood. They put out some “nervous As” – not cheap enough to be Bs but not expensive enough to be As. Repeat Performance fits that description.

Just before midnight on New Year's Eve, 1946, Broadway actress Sheila Page (Joan Leslie) shoots her husband Barney (Hayward) and then rushes to see her friend, odd-ball poet William Williams. After a distressed Sheila confesses her deed to William (Basehart), he suggests they talk to Sheila's producer John Friday (Tom Conway). As Sheila and William are walking up to John's apartment, Sheila wishes that she could relive the past year, insisting that if she had it to do over, she would not make the same mistakes twice. Upon reaching John's door, Sheila notices that William has disappeared and then gradually realizes that something is wrong.

The film is based on a book by William O'Farrell. O'Farrell doesn't seem to have many other books after this, his first. Published in 1942, the book is something. Over at the Mystery File, Dan Stumpf writes, “O’Farrell can write. He can put across a bitchy theatrical milieu and a seedy flophouse with equal aplomb, evoke a desperate chase and a disparate seduction with commensurate suspense, and weave a tale of murder and melodrama (verging on Soap Opera at times, but teetering skillfully on the edge) with prose that keeps the pages turning very nicely.”

There are many changes from the book (which is wonderfully bleak) and the movie. Barney is the actor that goes back in time, not Sheila. Barney begins the novel as a flop-house drunk after shooting his lover Paula when she tried to dump him. When on the run from cops, Barney and William get shot at by the cops leading to the magical happenings. The scene is so cinematic I'm a bit surprised they didn't find a way to shoe-horn it into the film. And although it is soapy, O'Farrell's novel concludes more satisfactory than most thrillers. A good read if you can find it.

O'Farrell's book was his only one to gain any attention. His movie and TV credits are slim too – he did write an episode of Alfred Hithcock Presents. Repeat Performance was remade into a 1980s TV movie (with Joan Leslie in a small part).

The cast of the '47 film includes Louis Hayward. Hayward's career wasn't what it was just a few years before, but he did make some interesting choices. He was best friends with Edgar G. Ulmer and appeared in Ulmer's Citizen-Kane-of-B-noir drama Ruthless in 1948. 1950 he starred in one of Fritz Lang's last US productions House By the River. Ladies in Retirement, And Then There Were None and Strange Woman all were released around the same time as Repeat Performance.

Tom Conway is a favorite. In addition to Cat People and the 7th Victim he was The Falcon in that long running mystery series (replacing brother George Sanders who got bored with the part. Similarly, Sanders replaced Hayward as The Saint in the movie series that The Falcon was most likely based on.)

Joan Leslie - so good in High Sierra - is very inspired as the conflicted Sheila and as strong as her Repeat Performance co-stars. Not an easy task when you consider how outrageous the story gets.

Finally, Richard Basehart captures the book's William part without being obvious about it. I know most remember Basehart from TV's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and the voice of the 1984 Olympics but his contributions to film noir is impressive. The next year Basehart would star in the unforgettable He Walked by Night. His other noir credits include the period film Reign of Terror, Tension, Outside the Wall, Fourteen Hours, The House on Telegraph Hill, and the Brit noir The Good Die Young. Source: www.noiroftheweek.com

Jake Gyllenhaal rumoured to date model Alyssa Miller

Jake Gyllenhaal out & about in New York City on June, 19 2013

Jake Gyllenhaal is reportedly dating another Sports Illustrated model. He was spotted enjoying lunch with 23-year-old Alyssa Miller at The Dutch in Soho, New York City, last week. They sparked romance rumours after they were seen "making out" at coffee shop Cold Process Coffee & Tea. Representatives for both Jake and Alyssa have declined to comment on speculation they are dating.

American fashion model Alyssa made her Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue debut in 2011, after becoming one of the new faces of Guess clothing in late 2010. She has also graced the front cover of Germany's Vogue and Elle in Italy and grew up wanting to be a professional soccer player. Source: www.film-news.co.uk

Natalie Portman could star in noirish cheerleading "Dare Me" film

Natalie Portman is being pursued by Fox 2000 to star in the film adaptation of Megan Abbott‘s novel Dare Me, a story involving high school cheerleaders, suicide, mystery, and presumably lots of drama. The film will center around two high school seniors, Beth Cassidy and Addy Hanlon, who have a Heather Chandler/ Veronica Sawyer type relationship, and how their world changes for the more mysterious once a new, young cheerleading coach enters the mix.

Natalie Portman and Jake Gyllenhaal, friends and co-stars in "Brothers" (2009)

The idea of a story that mixes elements of Heathers and Fight Club is definitely appealing, and I can see how the two could be combined into a twisted story with a strong but sadistic leader in a way that has the potential to be very interesting on the big screen.

Hopefully, if Portman does agree to be in the film, she brings some dark energy with her from roles like Black Swan. We may even get a successor to Heathers and Mean Girls if we’re lucky. Source: www.themarysue.com

Kirsten Dunst as cheerleading team captain Torrance Shipman in "Bring It On" (2000) directed by Peyton Reed

“What's exciting about Dare Me is how it makes that traditionally masculine genre [noir] feel distinctly female. It feels groundbreaking when Abbott takes noir conventions — loss of innocence, paranoia, the manipulative sexuality of newly independent women — and suggests that they're rooted in high school, deep in the hearts of all-American girls.” — Entertainment Weekly


Extract from "Dare Me" (2012) by Megan E. Abbott: "After a game, it takes a half hour under the shower head to get all the hairspray out. To peel off all the sequins. To dig out that last bobby pin nestled deep in your hair. Sometimes you stand under the hot gush for so long, looking at your body, counting every bruise. Touching every tender place. Watching the swirl at your feet, the glitter spinning. Like a mermaid shedding her scales.

After, you stand in front of the steaming mirror, the fuchsia streaks gone, the lashes unsparkled. And it's just you there, and you look like no one you've ever seen before. You don't look like anybody at all.

"There's something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls." Coach said that once, one fall afternoon long ago, sharp leaves whorling at our feet. But she said it not like someone's mom or a teacher or the principal or worst of all like a guidance counselor. She said it like she knew, and understood.

All those misty images of girls frolicking in locker rooms, pom-poms sprawling over bare bud breasts. All those endless fantasies and dirty boy-dreams, they're all true, in a way.

Mostly, it's hard, it's sweaty, it's the roughness of bruised and dented girl bodies, feet sore from floor pounding, elbows skinned red. But it is also a beautiful, beautiful thing, all of us in that close, wet space, safer than in all the world. The more I did it—the more it owned me. It made things matter. It put a spine into my spineless life and that spine spread, into backbone, ribs, collar bone, neck held high.

It was something. Don't say it wasn't. And Coach gave it all to us. We never had it before her. So can you blame me for wanting to keep it? To fight for it, to the end?

She was the one who showed me all the dark wonders of life, the real life, the life I'd only seen flickering from the corner of my eye. Did I ever feel anything at all until she showed me what feeling meant? Pushing at the corners of her cramped world with curled fists, she showed me what it meant to live.

There I am, Addy Hanlon, sixteen years old, hair like a long taffy pull and skin tight as a rubber band. I am on the gym floor, my girl Beth beside me, our cherried smiles and spray-tanned legs, ponytails bobbing in sync. Look at how my eyes shutter open and close, like everything is just too much to take in.

I was never one of those mask-faced teenagers, gum lodged in mouth corner, eyes rolling and long sighs. I was never that girl at all. But I knew those girls. And, when she came, I watched all their masks peel away. We're all the same under our skin, aren't we? We're all wanting things we don't understand. Things we can't even name. The yearning so deep, like pinions on our hearts." Source: www.meganabbott.com

Elysium & the most evil corporations

Matt Damon gives us a sneak preview of his upcoming sci-fi action film, Elysium which is realeased in Australia August 15.

“It’s better up there” is the tagline of the fictional Armadyne Corporation in the brand new sci-fi film ELYSIUM from director Neill Blomkamp (District 9). The tagine first appeared in the film’s very first teaser trailer, but in the brand new feature trailer we get an even more impressive glimpse of what this film has in store.

In the year 2159, two classes of people exist: the very wealthy, who live on a pristine man-made space station called Elysium, and the rest, who live on an overpopulated, ruined Earth. The people of Earth are desperate to escape the planet’s crime and poverty, and they critically need the state-of-the-art medical care available on Elysium – but some in Elysium will stop at nothing to enforce anti-immigration laws and preserve their citizens’ luxurious lifestyle. The only man with the chance bring equality to these worlds is Max, an ordinary guy in desperate need to get to Elysium. With his life hanging in the balance, he reluctantly takes on a dangerous mission – one that pits him against Elysium’s Secretary Delacourt and her hard-line forces – but if he succeeds, he could save not only his own life, but millions of people on Earth as well.

The film also stars Jodie Foster, Sharlto Copley, and Alice Braga, and arrives this August 9, 2013.
Source: www.scificool.com

The 15 Most Evil Movie Corporations:

Living in solitary confinement on the moon harvesting Helium-3 for Lunar Industries has its pros and cons. On the upside, you get help from a friendly robot that sounds suspiciously like a sad Kevin Spacey, and lots of time to build models and tighten up your ping-pong game. On the downside, it turns out you're just one in a series of clones created by the corporation, and all your precious memories are pre-planted lies. Also, some of your clones are jerks.

If you've been paying attention to the news, you know there's nothing more evil than hydrofracking. Or maybe you know it's the next great energy breakthrough. Either way, we can probably agree that manipulating kindly small town folk into selling their family farms for such a risky proposition is at least evil-lite.

The private military organization responsible for keeping the so-smart-they-can-traverse-the-universe but so-inept-they-can't-feed-themselves-on-the-voyage alien robo-lobster refugees of "District 9" in check is guilty of evil on three fronts: 1) They're ruthless — experimenting on interstellar guests with their own advanced, super-cool weaponry? For shame. 2) They perpetuate the military-industrial complex — it's like they've never heard a Dwight D. Eisenhower farewell address. 3) They're nepotistic — did they really think putting that bumbling, Inspector Clouseau of an Afrikaner in charge of inter-species relations was going to end on a high note?

When your corporate headquarters is 700 stories tall, based on pure probability alone there's a good chance there's some sinister business going on inside. But the Tyrell Corporation made it a sure thing by creating humanoid robots that are designed for dangerous (and sometimes sexy) work but occasionally escape into the Los Angeles streets where they wreck (sometimes sexy) mayhem. Additional evil notches in the Tyrell Corp belt for manufacturing a product that craps out every four years, thus making replicants the Xbox 360s of superhuman cyborgs.

Having had its hands in everything from military weaponry and space exploration to food and healthcare, OCP has perhaps the most impressive evil resume on the list (so long as you’re willing to overlook that gap year it spent backpacking through Europe). They even developed a plan so outrageously evil — building and operating their own "utopian" city — that it would never happen in real life.

If you're an Arnold Schwarzenegger character, there's likely an evil corporation bent on your destruction. (There's also an outside shot you might be pregnant — in which case, congrats!) Whether you've had your mind manipulated by a shady memory implanting service, been cloned against your will, forced to compete in a violent futuristic game show or programmed to prevent the existence of a future human hero and sent back in time only to be reprogrammed and sent back in time again by that very same hero to protect a rapscallion-y ten-year-old version of himself who then teaches you the value of human life ... well, anyway, the point is these corporations are, like, super-evil. Source: www.nextmovie.com