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Iron Man Noir Premiere HC
Posted by Notcot on May 17, 2010 in Noir
Mulholland Dr.
Posted by Notcot on May 10, 2010 in Cult Film
Amazon.co.uk Review
Pandora couldn’t resist opening the forbidden box containing all the delusions of mankind, and let’s just say in Mulholland Drive David Lynch indulges a similar impulse. Employing a familiar film noir atmosphere to unravel, as he coyly puts it, “a love story in the city of dreams”, Lynch establishes a foreboding but playful narrative in the film’s first half before subsuming all of Los Angeles and its corrupt ambitions into his voyeuristic universe of desire. Identities exchange, amnesia proliferates and nightmare visions are induced, but not before we’ve become enthralled by the film’s two main characters: the dazed and sullen femme fatale, Rita (Laura Elena Harring), and the pert blonde just-arrived from Ontario (played exquisitely by Naomi Watts) who decides to help Rita regain her memory. Triggered by a rapturous Spanish-language version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying”, Lynch’s best film since Blue Velvet splits glowingly into two equally compelling parts. –Fionn Meade
Blade Runner
Posted by Notcot on Apr 25, 2010 in Cult Film
Amazon.co.uk Review
When Ridley Scott’s cut of Blade Runner was finally released in 1993, one had to wonder why the studio hadn’t done it right the first time–11 years earlier. This version is so much better, mostly because of what’s been eliminated (the ludicrous and redundant voice-over narration and the phoney happy ending) rather than what’s been added (a bit more character development and a brief unicorn dream that drops a big hint about Deckard’s origins). Star Harrison Ford originally recorded the narration under duress at the insistence of Warner Bros. executives who thought the story needed further “explanation”; he later confessed that he thought if he did it badly they wouldn’t use it. (Moral: never overestimate the taste of movie executives.) The movie’s spectacular futuristic vision of Los Angeles–a perpetually dark and rainy metropolis that’s the nightmare antithesis of “Sunny Southern California”–is still its most seductive feature, another worldly atmosphere in which you can immerse yourself. The movie’s shadowy visual style, along with its classic private-detective/murder-mystery plot line (with Ford on the trail of a murderous android, or “replicant”), makes Blade Runner one of the few science fiction pictures legitimately to claim a place in the film noir tradition. And, as in the best noir, the sleuth discovers a whole lot more (about himself and the people he encounters) than he anticipates. The cast also includes Sean Young, Edward James Olmos, Daryl Hannah Rutger Hauer and M. Emmet Walsh. –Jim Emerson, Amazon.com
In the Box Set: It is a fitting testament to Blade Runner‘s enduring appeal that it should receive the red-carpet box set treatment in this Collector’s Edition, which represents a sizeable outlay not least in terms of shelf space. The chunky black box (about the size of the yellow pages) houses a slide-out tray containing the DVD, eight original lobby cards an original one-sheet movie poster, the draft shooting script and a movie image card with the corresponding 35mm film frame attached. As with all such sets the whole is rapidly diminished by removing its parts, presenting the dilemma of whether to mount the poster and pictures, or leave them pristine but unseen in their original state.
The DVD included contains Ridley Scott’s director’s cut version of the film, but offers no new features or commentaries which would have added considerably to the set’s desirability. The original draft shooting script by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples does, however, provide some fascinating insights in its moments of departure from the version that was finally filmed. Perhaps the most compelling example is Deckard’s final, decisive contribution to the “is he or isn’t he” debate: “I knew it on the roof that night. We were bothers, Roy Batty and I! Combat models of the highest order. We had fought in wars not yet dreamed of in vast nightmares still unnamed. We were the new people … Roy and me and Rachael! We were made for this world. It was ours!” –Steve Napleton
Tech-Noir Films, 1970-2005: An Annotated Filmography
Posted by Notcot on Apr 25, 2010 in Noir
The Development of the Tech-Noir Film: A Theory of the Development of Popular Genres in Fiction and Film
Posted by Notcot on Apr 23, 2010 in Noir
Jazz Noir: Listening to Music from “Phantom Lady” to “The Last Seduction”
Posted by Notcot on Apr 23, 2010 in Noir
Femme Noir: Bad Girls of Film: The Bad Girls of Film
Posted by Notcot on Apr 23, 2010 in Noir
Hard Boiled: Great Lines from Classic Noir Films
Posted by Notcot on Apr 22, 2010 in Noir
