WEIRDLAND

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Jake Gyllenhaal out & about with Naomi Foner and Alyssa Miller


Jake Gyllenhaal out for a stroll with mom Naomi Foner and model Alyssa Miller on July 13 2013, in New York City

Jake Gyllenhaal stepped out for a romantic brunch with his new girlfriend, model Alyssa Miller, on Sunday... but there was another VIP along for the Manhattan treat. The couple held hands as they walked down the street with Alyssa's dog Charlie and Jake's mom, screenwriter Naomi Foner. The trio looked cosy enough, and at least Naomi had Alyssa's dog Charlie to make up the numbers.

Jake was first linked to the Sports Illustrated model since June when they were spotted kissing during a romantic bike ride, again in Manhattan. The 24-year-old model loves between the east and west coasts, but she and Gyllenhaal, 32, have been conducting their courtship in the Big Apple. She recently travelled to Vegas with fellow SI models Chrissy Teigen and Nina Agdal. Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

Monday, July 15, 2013

The Book and the Film: the 70th Anniversary of James M. Cain’s ‘Double Indemnity’

"I stared into the darkness some more that night. I had killed a man, for money and a woman. I didn’t have the money and I didn’t have the woman. The woman was a killer, out-and-out, and she had made a fool of me. She had used me for a cat’s paw so she could have another man, and she had enough on me to hang me higher than a kite. . . I got to laughing, a hysterical cackle, there in the dark.” -James M. Cain’s character Walter Huff reflects on his crimes in the classic arc of the 'Double Indemnity' novel.

It's been 70 years since James M. Cain wrote the emblematic novel 'Double Indemnity,' which was published in 1943 in the volume 'Three of a Kind' (the story originally appeared as an eight-part serial in Liberty magazine in 1936). 'Double Indemnity' was filmed in 1944, directed by Billy Wilder and starring Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, and Edward G. Robinson. Walter in the book is portrayed as a man who is already a criminal by inclination and a acute sociopath.

In contrast, in the film he's made out to be a man who feels disappointed with his humdrum work, morally cracking, and only in hindsight he sees he should not have gotten involved with Phyllis Dietrichson. Billy Wilder managed to create one of the most iconic cinematic entries of the noir genre, with the inestimable help by legendary scribe Raymond Chandler (who collaborated with Wilder on translating Cain's novel into an incendiary screen script for which he received an Academy Award nomination.)

Walter Huff (Walter Neff played by Fred MacMurray) doesn't think of his victim, Mr. Nirdlinger (in the film Mr. Dietrichson) as a living human being, but only as an imaginary construct who obstructs his way to wealth goods and his object of desire. Cleverly, Cain does not allow the reader to know much of Nirdlinger (being mentioned only twice in the novel) This theme reveals one of Cain's main motifs in the novel, the latent instinct man harbors to kill without logical forethought.

The irrepressible attractions of sexuality and greed are part of Walter's motivation to kill, but Cain realizes that an ordinary working man with no outward criminal tendencies can allow himself to be driven to murder -- certainly one of the most nightmarish visions of modern man found in literature. Cain's other major theme in Double Indemnity is guilt and how it operates in the minds of his characters.

Barbara Stanwyck (who had played one of the most heartless femme fatales in 1933's 'Baby Face') molds her character into a blend of remorseless seductress and the Chandlerian ideal of the romanticized dame who is dangerous despite of herself, less of the mentally ill character of the novel (Phyllis: "Maybe I'm crazy. But there's something in me that loves Death. I think of myself as Death, sometimes. In a scarlet shroud, floating through the night. I'm so beautiful, then. And sad. And hungry to make the whole world happy, by taking them out where I am, into the night, away from all trouble, all unhappiness....") and more reminiscent of bad girl Velma who commits suicide in 'Farewell My Lovely' (written by Raymond Chandler in 1940).

Walter Huff and Phyllis Nirdlinger live in a society where one's wish can come true fairly quickly and with fairly little effort, a society where furniture is bought on easy-payment plans, where bungalows are rented in the Hollywood Hills for fifteen dollars a week, where single professional men can hire a maid and still afford to drive a new car. This is not the waste land of 'The Postman Always Rings Twice' (1934) -- it's a more civilized world, but because of its orderliness, the murder is far more devastating.

The film amplifies the sensuality from Cain's pages: “Under those blue pajamas was a shape to set a man nuts," recreating a suffocatingly muggy atmosphere with veiled allusions to the honeysuckle fragrance and an ankle bracelet, escalating into a bleak malaise scenario. One of the peculiarities of Cain's narrator is his unwillingness to divulge certain details of his chronicle, such as the grisly aspects surrounding the murder. This technique served Cain's brand of selective realism, thereby allowing the reader to invent at least part of the story.

James Naremore saw 'Pushover' (1954) directed by Richard Quine -which was called by The New York Times 'a mild facsimile of Double Indemnity'- as belonging to the same mood of obscure fascination that Double Indemnity had generated ten years ago, starring also Fred MacMurray, this time playing a jaded cop who is investigating a robber's moll (Kim Novak) and plans to get away with her and the stolen money.

The plot advances in a similar structure than 'Double Indemnity,' although we can appreciate remarkable differences, being the most important the factor of disillusionment that plagues Pushover throughout its forlorn urbane set.

Walter Neff is a self-assured insurance salesman who knows all the tricks to deceive his company (fatally clashing with his boss Barton Keyes, played adroitly by Edward G. Robinson) and coldly falls in the perverse Phyllis's arms (their embraces spark heat but their passion is ice cold), whereas Paul Sheridan (the aging cop from 'Pushover' is tired of his work routine and the phony 'decent' aspirations of his boring partners).

The oneiric effect in 'Double Indemnity' allows us interpret it as a dream, one in which Lola (Jean Heather) represents Walter's actual wife (ironically MacMurray wears a wedding ring although he's supposed to be single in the story) threatened by Phyllis (his fantasy woman) and Nino Zachetti stands for the young Walter at the time he fell in love with Lola.

Phyllis can be seen as a projection of his dark side, which will lead him to suicide by killing Phyllis -- she can't do that second shot because she isn't real-- and the dictaphone scene is his final confession to Keyes after betraying his trust. In this alternate take, Mr. Dietrichson would be Walter's father in law (whom he'd conned using his daughter Lola's help).

Also, Walter dies in order to escape the corporate business city and arising homosexual culture Keyes symbolizes. 'Double Indemnity' is one of the most definitive allegories of the 'double indentity' of the American common man that paradoxically so well befitted Fred MacMurray (whose portrait feels uncomfortably subversive due to the actors' affable image).

'Pushover' is a reverse tale despite of its similar structure and hardboiled tone. Paul Sheridan looks for that special woman of his dreams, he's a damaged romantic (his sensitivity was harmed by his parent's unhappy marriage) who detests the typical housewive-types pursued by his cop partners. The irony is he'll be brought down by the decent nurse in the film (played by Dorothy Malone) which will definitely seal his doomed romance with Lona (Kim Novak), a lonely vamp who is as lost and broken as Paul in an increasingly hostile policial state America was becoming in the '50s. "I thought I told you to go," Paul recriminates Lona when she decides to stand by him in the wake of his death. "We really didn't need that money, did we?", is the defeated cop's last heartbreaking line.

Article first published as The Book and the Film: the 70th Anniversary of James M. Cain’s ‘Double Indemnity’ on Blogcritics

Saturday, July 13, 2013

Jake Gyllenhaal walks the dog in New York City

 photo 020_zpsb6a912a6.jpg
Jake Gyllenhaal walking a friend's dog in New York City, on July 10, 2013

Trying to blend into the crowd in a grey T-shirt and baseball cap, the 32-year-old listened to music as he spent a relaxed day with his canine companion. The Prisoners star might have been linked to Sports Illustrated model Alyssa, but the 24-year-old was nowhere to be seen during the A-lister's low-key jaunt.

 photo 017_zps4ad177c7.jpg
With his headphones firmly plugged into his ears, the actor seemed to be getting into his music, tapping away on his phone as he sat back. Later on, he emerged with his little black and white dog in tow, holding him on a long black lead as they set off together. And the Donnie Darko star seemed to be trying to blend into the crowd, despite his A-list status, dressing down in baggy black trousers and a plain grey T-shirt. He wore a pair of Nike trainers, a navy baseball cap and a pair of dark glasses as he tried to go incognito.

 photo 010_zps717b79bd.jpg
Jake set tongues wagging about his new relationship when the pair were reportedly spotted dining together at The Dutch in SoHo.
He was previously rumoured to be dating another swimsuit model, Emily DiDonato, but the couple are said to have split after just a few months.

 photo 001_zps2e6f0818.jpg
Jake Gyllenhaal at The Beach Plum Inn & Restaurant in Martha's Vineyard on 1st July 2013

The A-lister seemed to be making the most of his time off before he starts his promo tour for forthcoming films Prisoners, in which he plays a cop pursuing a child kidnapper, released on September 20. He is also set to start shooting for new Rob Marshall film Into The Woods, as well as romantic comedy Nailed. Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

Thursday, July 11, 2013

Fred MacMurray (Love is Here) video


Fred MacMurray (Love is Here) video

Fred MacMurray & Carole Lombard in "Hands Across the Table" (1935) directed by Mitchell Leisen.

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Noir Alleys & the American Dream

The parallel between cinema and dreams is almost as old as film itself. Early surrealist filmmakers, for example, saw the mental production of dream images as analogous to the cutting necessary for film editing (Gabbard and Gabbard). But movie dreams are not solitary: as C. J. Pennethorne Hughes observed back in 1930, cinema is “the transmuted and regulated dream life of the people”. And if films are dreams, so dreams are often films: Jean-Louis Baudry reminds us how often a dreamer will wake and say, “It was like in a movie”. Hollywood is not called “the dream factory” for nothing. Not only do movies influence American dreams in a metaphorical sense, by furnishing stories that shape audiences’ ideas about success, selftransformation, love and a host of other themes; they also provide images and situations for actual dreams, which may resemble thrillers, horror movies, detective stories, or romances. Indeed, some of the cinematic dreams I examine below generate a kind of mise en abyme: a dream within a movie that alludes to other movie dreams. Thus, as Vicky Lebeau notes, because dreams inevitably partake of the culture at large, dream theory supports a “psychoanalytic study of culture”. Films noir serve this function better than most movie genres, for they are full of bad dreams; indeed, the picture many describe as the first film noir, Boris Ingster’s 1940 Stranger on the Third Floor, features a lengthy dream sequence that fosters the protagonist’s change of heart and forecasts his incarceration. More generally, Nicholas Christopher remarks that the noir cycle constitutes the “complex mosaic of a single, thirteen-year urban dreamscape.”

Janet Leigh and Van Heflin in "Act of Violence" (1948) directed by Fred Zinneman

Some veterans don’t lose their memories but have been stripped of their emotional resilience and their humanity. Yet they wish to reenact or recapture their warrior life —its camaraderie, its intensity, its clear sense of purpose—and return to the very incidents that traumatized them. In these reenactment scenes, which appear in almost all of the films discussed below, noir vets display the clinical symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder, characterized by “persistent, intrusive reexperiencing of the traumatic event through flashbacks and recurrent dreams with persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma, numbing of general responsiveness and persistent symptoms of increased arousal” (Theodore Nadelson).

Such traumatic episodes exemplify what Roger Luckhurst, paraphrasing Cathy Caruth, calls a “crisis of representation, of history and truth, and of narrative time”: that is, because the events are generally not consciously incorporated into the characters’ experiences or psyches, they are not spoken or written about. In this regard that prototypical noir narrative device, the flashback, serves an essential function. Such scenes epitomize Michael Rothberg’s definition of “traumatic realism,” whereby “the claims of reference live on, but so does the traumatic extremity that disables Realist representation”: they remain unintegrated into the films’ style, as if to reflect the vets’ psychic disintegration. Noir veterans undergo purgative rituals in which their old selves die and new ones are born. Some also play out the conventions of what Arthur Frank calls the “restitution narrative” —the “culturally preferred narrative” of institutional medicine—in which the agent is not the patient but a drug, a doctor, or, as in many vet noirs, a woman.

Restitution and Revenge: Two later vet noirs present similar quests by ex-soldiers: each veteran seeks to repay or vindicate a friend’s death and thereby release his own feelings of loss and betrayal ("Dead Reckoning" and "Ride the Pink Horse").

In Dead Reckoning Captain Rip Murdock (Humphrey Bogart), learning that his missing war buddy was an indicted murderer, tries to clear his name. Lucky Gagin (Robert Montgomery), in Ride the Pink Horse, seeks restitution from the mobster who killed his wartime friend, Shorty Thompson. Both vets struggle with PTSD, and both encounter women who serve as catalysts—in opposite ways—for their recovery. Like Cornered, these films dramatize how, as Nadelson writes, trauma victims “often desperately try to regain control by repeating and revisiting the event in dreams, fantasies, or re-enactments. They repeat the experience to achieve mastery, this time.”

Forging Noir Identities: “Every painting is a love affair,” according to cashier and Sunday painter Chris Cross (Edward G. Robinson), in Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street. Cross is explaining his aesthetic principles to Katherine “Kitty” March (Joan Bennett), who later conspires with her lover, the slimy Johnny Prince (Dan Duryea), to sign Cross’s paintings with her name. Cross’s words resonate beyond this film; indeed, they could provide the epigraph for a group of early films noir that depict men falling in love with a woman’s portrait.

Three films in particular—I Wake Up Screaming, Laura, and The Dark Corner— feature fetishized female images that males use to bolster their own identities or to fashion new ones. These women’s portraits become, in effect, mirrors or self-portraits of the men. In these retellings of the Galatea/Pygmalion myth each man ends up creator and forger of the woman and of himself. The pictorial representations in the films also generate two types of self-reflexivity. First, in employing the typical noir device of the framed narrative or flashback, the films analogically replicate the fashioning of these characters’ framed identities within exploitative perspectives. Second, their stories of fabricated female identities invoke Hollywood’s own fabrication of female stars in the studio system. Whereas the dream films, missing-person movies, and vet noirs test the virtues of selfreinvention and the pursuit of happiness, ultimately the forgery films’ complex aesthetic offers a more pointed challenge. In blurring the lines between originality and forgery, subjectivity and objectivity, real and representation, these films imply that human character is too malleable and complex to be framed within a single subject or explained by a single narrative. They advance the idea that identity is not an entity but a never-ending process. They thus turn upside down Franklin’s optimism about self-creation, implying that self reinvention may occur not as a result of individual choice but as an inevitable by-product of the gap between humans and our representations. Their critique of individualism is less political than philosophical and ontological, as they propose that all identities are, to some degree, forgeries.

Fractured: Steele remembers being called away from dinner with his friend Terry (Claire Trevor) by a message that his mother was ill. On the way to visit her, he became convinced his train was about to collide with another one. As the second train approaches, we see Steele and his reflection in the window: visually he is “a little fractured.” A series of quick cuts shows Steele from outside the window in full-face and in profile, both images tightly boxed within the window so that he resembles nothing so much as a portrait—of overpowering terror. He pulls the brake cord, stops the train, and collapses. But his mother was not ill, he has no train ticket, and no train wreck occurred yesterday. Perhaps, hypothesizes Lowell, his traumatic war experiences have affected his cognition. Steele is like those cognitively disabled veterans discussed in chapter 3: he can neither fully remember his traumas nor completely forget them. Yet his visual fracturing also links him to the cubist shapes and terror-ravaged faces portrayed by European modernists. Hence, his false memories indicate a rupture in his own realist aesthetic, based as it is on a congruence between representation and shared reality. Can we trust what we see or recall, especially if others don’t share our perceptions? “All of a sudden,” he confesses to Terry, “I don’t know myself. In twenty-four hours everything has become unfamiliar.” To further complicate matters, at the end Steele believes he has taken another journey, that “everybody’s nuts around this place” but himself. He remains suspended between his failure to remember what has happened to him and his inability to recover from his war injury.



Here Crack-Up (1946) augments the other vet noirs’ challenge to the American ideal of self-reinvention. If Steele, a war hero and famous exponent of truth, can’t start over, then can anyone in postwar America do so? And from what fragments will we paint our new self-portrait? Neither the shards of demolished European high culture nor embattled pictorial realism seem quite up to the task. The split portrait thus comes to represent America’s fissured psyche as well as the film’s—and indeed, film noir’s—divided aesthetic. All are a little fractured. -"Nightmare Alley: Film Noir and the American Dream" (2012) by Mark Osteen

Friday, July 05, 2013

Fatality and Identification in Noir Films

An icy blonde whose trademark hairstyle - a cascade of golden tresses that obscured one heavy-lidded eye - remained among the enduring images of Hollywood glamour, Veronica Lake was for a time, one of the most popular and sought-after actresses in motion pictures. She starred in a handful of features that, though the years, earned legendary status, including the film noirs, "This Gun for Hire" (1942) and "The Blue Dahlia" (1946), as well as the smart comedies, "Sullivan's Travels" (1941) and "I Married a Witch" (1942). She also motivated a generation of women to imitate her cool sexuality and chic style, at the same time, causing an equal number of men - particularly fighting WWII G.I.s - to fall for her. Unfortunately, her success was short-lived, her star fizzling under the weight of personal tragedies, gossip and mental illness. Despite her fall from grace, Lake stood the test of time as a Tinseltown icon, inspiring tribute in songs, literature, and movies - most notably Kim Basinger's Academy Award-winning turn in "L.A. Confidential" (1997), as a prostitute whose glacial beauty is modeled after Lake. Source: www.tcm.com

The famed "fascination and destnictiveness" of the femme fatale is, however, always enigmatic, and the power she wields is typically far in excess of her material presence.' One way of understanding this paradox is to say that the femme fatale functions neither literally nor allegorically but synecdochically within noir cinema, as a screen: as both herself and the bearer of a projected image. Now we can begin to recognize how noir negotiates between two versions of fascination: as the inherent property of a certain object, eliciting the gaze, or as relational and fantasmatic, projected by certain subjects. [...] renaming her the femme fascinant, the essence of film fascination, in noir both woman and film are invested with the power of fascination by the homme fasciné. For there is almost always one-and only one-for whom fascination with the femme as image proves fatal.

The scenario of Lang's The Woman in the Window is especially clear in this respect. Three friends-a district attorney, an old doctor, and a professor of psychology-all fantasize about the painting of their "dream girl," but only the expert on Freud falls for his fantasy. The synecdochic function of the femlne fatale is clear: she embodies one type of cinematic experience, a certain relation to the image, an exception to the rule.

In line with Mary Ann Doane's reading of the femme fatale as a doubly traumatizing "figure of fascination," in that she articulates not only a threat to male subjectivity but to a system of signification based on faith in the image: certain noir narratives became cinematically self-reflexive and made visible a moral or political preoccupation with film's power of fascination, in relation to the demands of negotiating fascination historically in the sphere of desire and death.

In the case of Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945), the invocation of Hollywood cinema's complicity is emphasized by the voice-over's open challenge to the audience's capacity for belief ("You're going to tell me you don't believe me!") and its desire to forget ("Did you ever want to cut away a piece of your memory and blot it out? You can't, you know!"). Variations on the theme connect such different films as The Spiral Staircase (Siodmak, 1946), a Gothic tale of trauma that begins with an extraordinary scene juxtaposing audience fascination and a brutal murder; Out of the Past (Tourneur, 1947), often paired with The Killers for the lethal return of the past and the fascinating allure of its femme fatale, and Dark Passage (Delmer Daves, 1947), in which the sight of acute male lack coincides with a radical restriction in camera point of view.

Swede relates to Kitty as spectator to image: he only has eyes for her, so that the room becomes a kind of cinema for Swede. It is as if he had kept his date but passed through the screen to encounter his fantasmatic image of a woman, animated like Alice's painting in the window in Lang's movie or, even more precisely (given the resemblance of their dark cross-strap dresses), like the uncanny portrait in Otto Preminger's Laura (1944). The body of the homme fasciné ends "near tore in half," proof that contact with the image is lethal.

We might conclude that what noir criticism has failed to reckon with is noir cinema's own engagement with fascination. How the movies themselves understand fascination historically has remained obscure, while fascination in noir has much to do with the obscurity and obscuring, the loss of history itself. Logically enough, our "objective" critical distance is also already inscribed reflexively within certain noir films, but with a twist that is crucial to their affective appeal: when the dispassionate analytical eye triumphs over a gaze distorted by desire, it feels like a defeat, suggesting that what must be recovered is in fact precisely the naive affinity, the apparently uncritical and unhistorical "identificatory" note, suggested by Michael Walker's "unsolved mystery": what at first appears as a simple internal contradiction between fact and fantasy, typically embodied by the central character(s) in the split between knowledge and belief, breaks down; and as it does so, it opens up what Tom Conley calls the "median area, between spectators' fantasies and the facts of the film." -"Film Noir Fascination: Outside History" by Oliver Harris (Cinema Journal, Vol. 43, No. 1., Fall 2003)

James Naremore uses the example of "Double Indemnity" to illustrate what he terms "performance within performance" whereby the film character is also performing a role in the diegesis. Fred MacMurray plays the role of Walter Neff who falls for the wife of a potential client; playing innocent to his superior Walter Keyes (Edward G. Robinson). For Richard De Cordova, this masking of "dissimulation" is a common model in film noir. Sylvia Harvey (Woman's Place: The Absent Family in Film Noir) argues than a canonical noir text as "Double Indemnity" stages the woman as a sign of desire for insurance salesman Walter Neff, an emblematic alienated male in an economy driven by corporations rather than individuals. -"A Companion to Film Noir" (2013) by Andrew Spicer & Helen Hanson

Wednesday, July 03, 2013

"Pushover" (1954) directed by Richard Quine (Full Movie)


Pushover (1954) directed by Richard Quine, starring Fred MacMurray, Kim Novak and Dorothy Malone

Never a scenery-chewer, MacMurray quietly shines in his role - giving a restrained and authentic performance. Addled with bills and complexes, his weary flatfoot aches to break free - and with Leona's insistence that .."Money isn't dirty, just people..", mulls it over, goes against his better judgment, and concludes that the iron's just hot enough. Complementing MacMurray in her debut lead role, Novak delivers the goods - equal parts beauty and raw talent. Sort of a 'fatale-in-training', her Leona is less guilty of treachery than of youthful inexperience - in her scheme to 'rob Peter to pay Paul'. Showing a real knack for noir, Quine (who's only other genre credit is the passable 'Drive a Crooked Road') keeps his compositions tight, confining - and his streets rain-slicked. His flat 50's cinematography is perfect for showcasing the story's late-night dives, back alleys, and shadow-laced apartments. Source: www.noiroftheweek.com

Monday, July 01, 2013

Happy Anniversary, James M. Cain!

Edward G. Robinson and Fred MacMurray in "Double Indemnity" (1944) directed by Billy Wilder, based on the novel "Double Indemnity" (1943) by James M. Cain

MacMurray's performance and chemistry with Barbara Stanwyck would be incendiary. Cast against type it would be amongst the defining performances of a career that seventeen years later would find him playing Professor Ned Brainerd in Disney's The Absent-Minded Professor. MacMurray would later describe Double Indemnity as "the best picture I ever made."

The chemistry between MacMurray and Stanwyck drives the narrative of Double Indemnity. Even as the Hay's Production Code forbade the depiction of explicit sex, as the couple discuss the various mundanities of insurance cover the conversation becomes the unlikely kindling of a convincing Amour Fou. As Dietrichson says, "There's a speed limit in this state Mister, and I think you just broke it." Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

She closed her eyes, and after a while she began to cry. I put my arm around her and patted her. It seemed funny, after what we had been talking about, that I was treating her like some child that had lost a penny. "Please, Walter, don't let me do this. We can't. It's simply—insane."
"Yes, it's insane."
"We're going to do it. I can feel it."
"I too."
"I haven't any reason. He treats me as well as a man can treat a woman. I don't love him, but he's never done anything to me."
"But you're going to do it."
"Yes, God help me, I'm going to do it."
She stopped crying, and lay in my arms for a while without saying anything. Then she began to talk almost in a whisper.
"He's not happy. He'll be better off—dead."
"Yeah?"
"That's not true, is it?"
"Not from where he sits, I don't think."
"I know it's not true. I tell myself it's not true. But there's something in me, I don't know what. Maybe I'm crazy. But there's something in me that loves Death. I think of myself as Death, sometimes. In a scarlet shroud, floating through the night. I'm so beautiful, then. And sad. And hungry to make the whole world happy, by taking them out where I am, into the night, away from all trouble, all unhappiness...Walter, this is the awful part. I know this is terrible. I tell myself it's terrible. But to me, it doesn't seem terrible. It seems as though I'm doing something—that's really best for him, if he only knew it. Do you understand me, 'Walter?"
"No."
"Nobody could."
"But we're going to do it."
"Yes, we're going to do it."
"Straight down the line."
"Straight down the line."

-Get this, Phyllis. There's three essential elements to a successful murder." That word was out before I knew it. I looked at her quick. I thought she'd wince under it. She didn't. She leaned forward. The firelight was reflected in her eyes like she was some kind of leopard. "Go on. I'm listening." "The first is, help. One person can't get away with it, that is unless they're going to admit it and plead the unwritten law or something. It takes more than one. The second is, the time, the place, the way, all known in advance—to us, but not to him. The third is, audacity. That's the one that all amateur murderers forget. They know the first two, sometimes. But that third, only a professional knows. There comes a time in any murder when the only thing that can see you through is audacity, and I can't tell you why. You know the perfect murder? You think it's this swimming pool job, and you're going to do it so slick nobody would ever guess it. They'd guess it in two seconds, flat. In three seconds, flat, they'd prove it, and in four seconds, flat, you'd confess it. No, that's not it. The perfect murder is the gangster that goes on the spot. You know what they do? First they get a finger on him. They get that girl that he lives with. Along about six o'clock they get a phone call from her. She goes out to a drugstore to buy some lipstick, and she calls. They're going to see a picture tonight, he and she, and it's at such and such a theatre. They'll get there around nine o'clock. All right, there's the first two elements. They got help, and they fixed the time and the place in advance. All right, now watch the third. They go there in a car. They park across the street. They keep the motor running. They put a sentry out. He loafs up an alley, and pretty soon he drops a handkerchief and picks it up. That means he's coming. They get out of the car. They drift up to the theatre. They close in on him. And right there, in the glare of the lights, with a couple hundred people looking on, they let him have it. He hasn't got a chance. Twenty bullets hit him, from four or five automatics. He falls, they scram for the car, they drive off—and then you try to convict them. You just try to convict them. They've got their alibis ready in advance, all airtight, they were only seen for a second, by people who were so scared they didn't know what they were looking at—and there isn't a chance to convict them. The police know who they are, of course. They round them up, give them the water cure—and then they're habeas corpused into court and turned loose. Those guys don't get convicted. They get put on the spot by other gangsters. Oh yeah, they know their stuff, all right. And if we want to get away with it, we've got to do it the way they do it, and not the way some punk up near San Francisco does it, that's had two trials already, and still he's not free." -"Double Indemnity" (1943) by James M. Cain

Gay Marriage is Legalized in California

Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger as Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar in "Brokeback Mountain" (2005) directed by Ang Lee

US Didn't Become Pro-Gay Overnight: The movie Brokeback Mountain looks like a big, bold, manly Western movie. But instead of the usual "boy meets girl" romance, this film's about "cowboy meets cowboy." "It is very, very propagandistic because the entire purpose of the movie is to make homosexuality seem like something good and appealing, and to make people who are opposed to homosexuality bigots and homophobes," said David Kupelian. There have been homosexual movies for years, but they are usually marketed to gay and art-house audiences. That was not the case with "Brokeback." Source: www.cbn.com

As crowds celebrate from the Castro to the Village, the implications of the Supreme Court's DOMA and Prop 8 decisions are still reverberating around the country. But as same sex couples start to register at Crate & Barrel, shouldn't they wonder: Of all the institutions to be committed to, is marriage really the sanest choice?

Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in "Double Indemnity" (1944) directed by Billy Wilder

If Hollywood is any guide, it probably isn't. From Double Indemnity and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf to War of the Roses and Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the silver screen is littered with bitter, vitriolic marriages scarred by regret, revenge and recrimination. Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Same-Sex Marriage Law Could Mean Wedding Bells for Straight Hollywood Couples In 2006, longtime partners Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie made clear that they would not tie the knot until all couples could, with the actor telling Esquire that "Angie and I will consider tying the knot when everyone else in the country who wants to be married is legally able." And while Pitt did put a ring on it in 2012, the duo has yet to make it down the aisle." Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com