Noir Tales

Holden: [in a letter to Justine] "Dear Justine, because of you I will be quitting the Retail Rodeo. The last two days have been the most God awful of my life. I've not been able to get rid of you in my head. I've never wanted anything so bad and I have wanted many things. I'd given up long ago on being gotten by someone else, and then you came along. The idea that I could be gotten because of circumstance or never get got is the worst feeling I've ever felt and I have felt many bad feelings. I'm sorry I can never see you again, Justine. Forgive me for being so weak, but that is who I am. Goodbye. Holden Worther. If, for some reason, you could change your mind and wanna be with me body and soul, meet me after work. I will be waiting for you at 5pm outside Chuck E. Cheese. If you are not there at 5 you will never see me again in your lifetime".
"Directed by Miguel Arteta from Mike White's script, "The Good Girl" is at once romantic and snide.
If "The Good Girl" were a film noir (which, in a way, it is), Holden would be the unstable femme fatale and Justine the middle-class patsy looking to crash out of a humdrum existence. This good girl is trapped in a world of crazies and idiots.
Almost behind its own back, the story of Justine's reckless affair becomes an all-American tale of crime, violence, blackmail, obsession, and betrayal. Events take a swerve toward the serious—but not entirely. Arteta and White have created an impacted road film, or maybe an ironic outlaw ballad. The fake sincerity of the unhappy "happy ending" is clinched by Gillian Welch's twangy closing-credit rendition of the venerable bad-man ballad "Railroad Bill." It's exit music for a movie where there is none." -by J. Hoberman. Source: www.Villagevoice.com
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"Visions of Marsha's faithlessness haunted him. Daytime fantasies of sexual abandon permeated his thoughts. And the thing was, they wouldn't understand how she really was. He, Waldo, alone understood this. He had intuitively grasped every nook and cranny of her psyche. He had made her smile. She needed him, and he wasn't there (aaahh..) You could go anywhere in the mails.
Mr. Jameson of the Clarence Darrow Post Office rang the doorbell of the large stucco colored frame house. When Marsha Bronson opened the door, he helped her carry the package in. He had his yellow and his green slips of paper signed and left with a fifteen cent tip that Marsha had gotten out of her mother's small beige pocketbook in the den. "What do you think it is?" Sheila asked. Marsha stood with her arms folded behind her back. Then smiling, "I got an idea." "What?" said Marsha. "Just watch," said Sheila, touching her finger to her head. Inside the package, Waldo was so transfixed with excitement that he could barely breathe. His skin felt prickly from the heat, and he could feel his heart beating in his throat. It would be soon. Sheila stood quite upright and walked around to the other side of the package. Then she sank down to her knees, grasped the cutter by both handles, took a deep breath, and plunged the long blade through the middle of the package, through the masking tape, through the cardboard, through the cushioning and (thud) right through the center of Waldo Jeffers head, which split slightly and caused little rhythmic arcs of red to pulsate gently in the morning sun."
-"The Gift" (1967) a short story written by Lou Reed, it belongs to "White Light/White Heat" album by The Velvet Underground.
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"Most reviews of Rian Johnson's "Brick" came down to variations on these themes, and not for bad reason.
Yes, "Brick" is a film noir—complete with slangy, speedy dialogue, murder, femmes fatale, and plot twists—transplanted to the world of high school. And yes, that's awesome. But it's not the end of the story. Some reviews caught on to the significance of the high school setting, where each emotion is outsized and every bit of drama feels like a life-or-death situation.
But even these reviews tended to miss the bruised, beating heart beneath the film-school cleverness of the set-up. In Johnson's story and wide, empty compositions—as well as in Joseph Gordon-Levitt's astonishing performance—lies a deep sadness specifically attuned to the worlds of both high school and film noir.
Gordon-Levitt's Brendan is two types: the cold, distant hero of noir and the ultra-smart loner of high school (he "eats alone" in more ways than one). Throughout the course of the film, Brendan's solitude helps him solve the case, but he loses everything in the process.
In this sense, "Brick" functions as a sly and intensely moving deconstruction of noir tropes. This is no celebration of Humphrey Bogart's "cool" stoicism; it's an elegy for lost souls." —Matt Noller, Athens, GA.
Source: www.Avclub.com
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"Ralph stood on the corner, leaning against the brick wall of Silver's candy store, telling himself to go home and get some sleep..."
"You don't know what you'll be doing tonight. Or tomorrow. Or the day after tomorrow. What are you? What do you do? You stand on the corner. You're one of the bums. You're thirty years old and what do you have? "Nothing." "Is that what you want?" "It gives me very little to worry about. I don't have to think about losing it. There's nothing to lose."
-from "The Blonde on the Street Corner" (1954) by David Goodis. Books by David Goodis.

Anne Becoming Jane

"Anne Hathaway has said she might have to quit acting if her performance in new film "Becoming Jane" is attacked by critics. Anne had to use an English accent to play write Jane Austen in the film and told Grazia that she worked hard to perfect it: “If [I knew if] I messed this up, I’d never forgive myself. I might have to stop acting. The key thing was the accent because everybody will be listening for it.”

“I had really bad dreams about being chased around and stabbed to death with a quill by Austen.” "I was having panic attacks and would wake in the middle of the night sweating and breathing very heavily because it would have really broke my heart to have messed this one up."
”Anne considered staying in her new accent for the whole time during filming to avoid having to relearn it every morning but her boyfriend Raffaello Follieri wouldn’t let her: “He begged me to stop. I really immersed myself in it, but when I talked to Raffaello, he said, ‘Please! It’s bad enough you’re abroad and I can’t see you, now I can’t even hear you!’ So I spoke as myself with him.” Source: http://Fametastic.co.uk

Loving Cola

Jake holding a Coca-Cola bottle.

Kirsten Dunst in the ShoWest Award Ceremony
(16 March 2007)


Kirsten signing at the "Coca-Cola Green Room".
Kirsten enjoying her Cola glass and Coca-Cola can.

Reese Witherspoon.
"Coca-Cola bottles portrait" by Andy Warhol.
Rachel Bilson wearing an Edie Sedgwick-printed shirt.
Sienna Miller as Edie Sedgwick in "Factory Girl" (2006)
The real Edie Sedgwick (1943-1971).
"We are in 1966. The elevator wails reaching the fourth plant. In the middle of the silverplated refuge [The Factory], Edie Sedgwick is sitting on a huge quilted red sofa, her visage is warm but severe, her eyes alive. She smokes a cigarette, sips one pepsi." -"Stargazer: Andy Warhol's World and His Films" (1974) by Stephen Koch.

Ruffalo and The Fountain

"There are a number of things that make David Fincher’s "Zodiac" a masterpiece. I can’t go into them all here, but one of the main weapons Fincher has is his cast, and one of the best performances in that cast comes from Mark Ruffalo.

He’s always been a great actor, but he’s been flying just under the mainstream radar for years, and if there’s any justice, "Zodiac" is going to do a lot to change that. And maybe "The Brothers Bloom" will help as well. Ruffalo has just signed on to

join Rian Johnson’s incredibly awaited follow-up to "Brick", playing the older of the titular con man brothers. Adrien Brody plays the younger brother, while "Babel"’s Rinko Kikuchi plays a woman who helps the duo in their scams.

Also on board is the beautiful Rachel Weisz." -By Devin Faraci.

Download "The Fountain" Soundtrack
"Perhaps what makes THE FOUNTAIN Mansell’s best score, and Aronofsky’s best film (until its indecipherable ending), is that this is a love story through all of its grand sci-fi illusions.
Mansell, once again joined by the poignant strings of The Kronos Quartet (as well as the alt. artist Mogwai), instantly convey the undying bond between Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz’s time-crossed couple.

It’s an approach that firmly connects his scoring for THE FOUNTAIN in a straight, conceptual line with PI and REQUIEM
as music looks into the face of God (real or chemically-induced) to learn some fantastic truth." -By Daniel Schweiger.
Sources: www.Chud.com and www.Ifmagazine.com/

On "Rendition" set

Source: www.Realmovienews.com

Commenting "Rendition"

Rendition: Previews 2007 New Line

"Emotionally riveting and politically relevant, "Rendition" is a daring film that isn’t afraid to ask tough questions. With an

all-star cast that includes Oscar winners Reese Witherspoon

and Meryl Streep and Oscar nominee Jake Gyllenhaal, "Rendition" paints a vast yet intimate canvas of a world in crisis and a family in peril.

Thematically, the film bears some resemblance to "Syriana" and "Bourne Identity," as it's both a cautionary tale and a taut political thriller. "Rendition" walks a fine line between interrogation and torture, between working for the greater good in a post 9/11 world and violating basic codes of decency--between fighting terrorism and becoming a terrorist.

The film's protagonist is Anwar El-Ibraim, a Canadian scientist of Egyptian decent. Caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, he is about to find out what happens when that line is crossed. Anwar is anxious to get home and see his family after a business trip in Rio de Janeiro. Unfortunately, his homecoming is delayed.

Thousands of miles away, in Cairo, a suicide bomb has just rocked the heavily populated Sadat Plaza. Thirty-six are dead, one an American. Rashid Silime, a well-known terrorist and head of the El-Hazim Brigage, a Hezbollah splinter cell, has claimed responsibility. Restitution is needed. Enters Anwar, who happens to be a biochemist with bomb-making experience and family ties to Egypt.

Anwar boarded his plane in Rio as a businessman; he lands in New York a terrorist. As he gets off the plane, Anwar is bound, hooded and taken away. In a few hours he finds himself naked and alone in a barren cell in Cairo. His troubles are just beginning. Anwar is the subject of “Extraordinary Rendition,” a program that authorizes the US government to seize and transfer terrorism suspects to their countries of origin, where they can be “interrogated” without legal protections or restraints.

To the outside world there is no trace of Anwar. The airline claims he was never on the plane from Rio, immigration has no record of his arrival in the U.S. No one seems to know where he is; no one is talking. In desperation, his wife (Reese Withersoon) turns to the only man she can trust, Alan Smith (Peter Sarsgaard), an old friend and Washington insider. Jointly they try to piece together what has happened to her husband.

On the other side of the world, there are people who know exactly what is happening to Anwar. One of them is Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal), a National Security Agent stationed in Cairo, who has just been assigned to oversee Anwar’s rendition. Unlike the rest of his colleagues, however, Douglas isn’t convinced that the man had anything do with horrific bombing, nor is he convinced Anwar will survive what is turning into a brutal interrogation.

Driven by conflicting forces of duty and conscience, loyalty and morality, Douglas must ultimately make a choice, a choice that propels "Rendition" to its disturbing and inevitable conclusion.

Written by Kelley Sane, "Rendition is directed by Gavin Hood, who won the Best Foreign-Language Oscar for "Tsotsi." It stars Oscar winner Reese Witherspoon (Walk the Line, Legally Blonde), Oscar winner Meryl Streep (Devil Wears Prada, Adaptation),

Oscar nominee Jake Gyllenhaal (Brokeback Mountain, Jarhead),

and Peter Sarsgaard (Jarhead, Flightplan).

New Line plans to release "Rendition" in late fall/early winter.
Source: http://emanuellevy.com

Web Slinger

"Jake Gyllenhaal may soon collect an awfully big paycheck as America's latest superhero. We hear New Line execs are keen to have the "Brokeback Mountain" hunk play Captain Marvel in "Shazam!" Based on the DC comic, the movie is New Line's bid for a franchise on the order of "Batman" and "Superman." "They're ready to spend up to $200 million to get it started," an insider tells us. Sources say director Peter Segal and his fellow producers want to nab Gyllenhaal before "Spider-Man" director Sam Raimi does - with "Spider-Man 3" due to open on May 4, star Tobey Maguire has said he may let someone else play the web slinger."

Source: From the New York Daily News newspaper.

Two "Zodiac" reviews

"What David Fincher has accomplished is to remind the audience why serial-killers scare us so deeply – it's that they can exist in the real world, that they creep among us and could strike at any moment. [...] The acting across the board is terrific – faithful to the period without sinking into kitsch, restrained without being intentionally dull or "lifelike," and in the case of Jake Gyllenhaal, a real show of range that may even outdo his "Brokeback Mountain" performance.

Gwyneth Paltrow in New Line Cinema's Seven - 1995

I never liked "Seven" because I thought Fincher spent too much time glorifying the sleazy world he'd conjured up, but this movie feels like a rethinking of an earlier film as dramatic as the later violence-is-bad Eastwood movies. (Tellingly, there are very few showy shots in the entire film.) I can always do without scenes of a beleaguered wife whining to her hard-working husband, but there's no question the movie agrees with her. Fincher is as obsessed as his characters are about the crime –the laying-out of the case is fascinatingly detailed but still riveting – but he's smart enough not to fall apart with them. This is a 159-minute treatise on the futility of obsession that never takes it easy on its characters – even when Gyllenhaal’s Robert Graysmith finally gets his wish to “uncover” the truth about the killer at the end of the film, he realizes how empty a dream it really was. It's absolutely tragic and utterly brilliant. I can't think of a crime drama I've loved so completely." Source: www.Thesimon.com

"Zodiac is a meta-thriller: it comments on itself and other serial killer movies, and in a broader sense, on our obsession with real life and fictional serial killers -" -by Randall A Byrn.
Read the full review Source: http://Blogcritics.org

Noir Archetypes

"As I slowly peeled away the jacket, the seductive image of a woman in a blood-red dress stood before me."
"Roger Ebert calls film noir “the most American film genre, because no society could have created a world so filled with doom, fate, fear, and betrayal, unless it were essentially naive and optimistic.”
The film noir world is one of sharp-edged shadows, strange angles, and lonely settings."
Source: http://webdelsol.com
"According to Krutnik, the ‘noir’ text deals, typically, with issues of alienation and isolation in the individual protagonist, whilst also reflecting wider social concerns. This essay examines two texts of the 1950’s described as ‘noir’, both of which deal, in very different ways, with anxieties about consumer culture, identity, and the invalidity of the American Dream.
Although written in 1954, Goodis’ "The Blonde on the Street Corner" deals, retrospectively, with depression-era 1930’s America.
Goodis is able to create the bleak and hopeless atmosphere necessary for his noirish portrait of fragmented masculine identity, and individual alienation from society.
Modern mass consumption brought even darker visions of an American matriarchy.
Destructive of men, of families, ultimately of the very culture that was supposed to be her special domain, modern American women were “consuming” in every sense of the word.
This nightmarish vision of female consumerism can be seen reflected throughout "The Blonde on the Street Corner".
Krutnik confirms that this confused attitude towards women is a common characteristic of Noir protagonists experiencing crises of masculine identity.
He states that ‘not only do such heroes quite clearly have problems in ‘relating’ to women but they also subject them to a chaotic process of both overvaluation
(of their sexuality) and devaluation (of their subjectivity). Consequently, they find it difficult to stabilise their own identities. When understood in
this way, Goodis’ portrayal of the women in the text as exaggerated caricatures, begins to make sense.
Goodis is also subverting and developing the characteristics of the noir tradition in which he writes, taking to extremes the already established conventions of the genre.
Generally characterised by the makeup, long hair and phallic images (such as cigarettes and guns) that signify her overt and slightly threatening sexuality, she induces male unease precisely because of the ‘unnatural’ sexuality that makes her attractive in the first place.
Place’s observations relate mainly to the more understated portrayals of dangerous women found in earlier noir films and texts, but they could also be useful when looking at Goodis’ Lenore, who can be seen to function throughout the text as an exaggerated parody of the conventional ‘spider woman’.
Unlike the traditional femme fatale, whose allure is only partly constructed through makeup and hair dye, Lenore’s beauty is revealed to be entirely artificial.
She is described as ‘a ripe blonde who used peroxide on her hair and too much lipstick and mascara’, and she induces ‘an unclean feeling’ in the male onlooker.
In effect, the text plays with the idea that the femme fatale often acts as a site of juxtapositioned male fantasy and fear, presenting the reader with a character who is overtly, grotesquely, frightening and sexual.
Lenore is presented as a consumer of men, and it is this aspect of her character that proves most threatening to the male protagonist.
Cowie argues that male anxieties about devouring women threatening masculine identity often found in noir texts, stem more from psychic unease than social reality– a fact that Goodis makes clear in his over-the-top portrayal of male paranoia in a depression-era nightmare.
If Lenore (and indeed, her prototype, the conventional femme fatale) is taken to represent Rosenberg’s ‘modern woman’, the face of the new consumer society in America, then the ‘nurturing woman’ who acts as her opposite could perhaps be seen as a representative of the old, producer orientated society that the rise of consumerism was threatening to destroy.
The destruction of the femme fatale at the end of ‘typical’ noir films and texts points to a mainstream audience desire for the restoration of order, which can be seen in the form of the conventional, reassuringly traditional nurturing woman. By allowing Lenore to triumph, Goodis effectively turns this noir convention on its head.
The mood of nihilistic despair that pervades the text makes it clear that the consumption-based future, for Goodis, is bleak." -Emma Turzynski, Lancaster University. Source:www.Crimeculture.com

No arts were more closely allied with noir than photography and jazz. Arthur "Weegee" Fellig was the most flamboyant of the extraordinary crime photographers who explored the seedy side of noir's mise en scène and established its visual vocabulary at New York's "Daily News" in the 1930's and 40's.
Versions of Weegee's subjects turn up as extras and bit players on the periphereies of noir, scrubbing floors in the back ground of "Mildred Pierce" (1945), cleaning offices and running elevators in "Double Indemnity".
A notorious con man, a heroin addict "always in a panic" as he once described himself, no stranger to the police bust or the mental institution, dying young but exhausted at 34 in 1955, [Charlie] Parker seemed the incarnation of noir's most extravagantly romantic impulses.
An avid moviegoer, he improvised his own lush yet nervous virtuoso version of the title song of "Laura", by David Raksin and Johnny Mercer.
Noir was eclipsed in the late 1950s by the melodramatic Actors Studio case studies of pampered young males in a new kind of definitively post-Depression crisis, and by science-fiction fantasies, about nuclear fallout and outer space, subjects noir, largely a city-bound genre and certainly an earthbound one, was not equipped to address. Yet after its apparent demise in the 1960's, noir made a brilliant comeback in the 1970's, led by Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and

Brian De Palma, a neo-noir vogue still flourishing today. Noir serves as a screen memory for its times [...] remembering a part of it but not the whole, focusing on the corner but not the room, the angle of light but not the object in it. A screen memory records the unmistakable residue of a loss, a catastrophe denied."
-extracts from "Day Into Noir" article by Ann Douglas for "Vanity Fair", March 2007.

"Film noir has its roots in German expressionism, during the pre-World War II days. [...]
"Brick", though contemporary audiences may not recognize it, comes from a long line of progenitors. Those who enjoyed this movie but have never seen "The Maltese Falcon", "Casablanca", "Key Largo", "The Big Sleep" and "High Sierra" should raid local video rental stores to find them. Those were the films that set this particular bar.
Film noir always has the loner hero, a man who must walk down mean streets even though he himself is not mean. With those words, Raymond Chandler launched a thousand novelist and film careers.
In "Brick", Brendan Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is the loner hero, set apart from the rest of high school. Although the viewer doesn’t know exactly what it is that has set Brendan apart, the fact that he exists separately resonates throughout the tale. He’s possessed of dogged determination and he’s loyal.
He’s also hurting from the rejection of his girlfriend, Emily (Emilie de Ravin). She told him she wasn’t like him, that she couldn’t just cast herself off from the rest of the crowd and exist independently.Holding true to his love and his sense of honor, Brendan begins tracking Emily’s killer. He enlists the aid of the Brain (Matt O’Leary), a young geek who – like Brendan – is a loner, but not quite as alone as Brendan.
Laura (Nora Zehetner) – the femme fatale who knowsenough to get Brendan in even worse trouble and wants him for herself." -by Mel Odom.
Source: http://Blogcritics.org