“Who’s Crazy Now?”

Noir City 9: “Who’s Crazy Now?”
Runs February 11 – 17, 2011 @ SIFF Cinema

Presented by the Film Noir Foundation &
Seattle International Film Festival

By the chatter, Noir City 9 exceeded everyone’s luridly retro dreams at its San Francisco premiere, last month. This year’s festival is organized around the theme “Who’s Crazy Now?” and features a typical mixture of amazing –the beloved, the abandoned, the beautiful, the fatally campy.

Dark Mirror

Stranger on the Third Floor

Hunted

Crackup

I’m pleased to say that the Crazy Train pulls into Rain City on Friday. What Seattleites need to know: It’s at SIFF Cinema, in McCaw Hall, 321 Mercer Street, all week. Follow the below link. Use alcohol and antidepressants wisely.

http://www.siff.net/cinema/seriesDetail.aspx?FID=221

And that’s right, Los Angeles. You wait until March. Cry me a river.

©Tony Diaz, 2011

The Endless Night: A Valentine to Film Noir

Eddie Muller introduced this sublime noir montage at Noir City 8. A year later, I’m still a little bit in awe. I think it’s the most beautiful homage to a film genre I’ve ever seen:

Remake

I haven’t written about film in way, way too long, an oversight which I plan to correct, here. The entries you see below have been imported from elsewhere. Those above will be native to these parts.

Danny Boyle’s Dickensian Mumbai

I find that my head is crowded with images of Mumbai, today, culled not so much from the past few days’ news footage of gunmen and burning luxury hotels as from Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, which I finally got around to seeing last night:

The Cinema of Lost Innocents

In between bouts of sick and overtime, I did manage to see a two excellent movies during the latter half of January: The Orphanage and Persepolis.

Cinematic Affective Disorder: No Country for Old Men, etc.

As a rule, I kind of like depressing movies. But even I have my limits. marginalia has been my partner in crime through a week-and-a-half-long marathon of some of this fall’s darkest (and, in at least a couple of instances, most promising) films.

walkin' on the sun

I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I agree with the Stranger reviewers about anything, but I thought Danny Boyle’s Sunshine really does accomplish for the “space missions gone wrong” what 28 Days Later did for zombie flicks. At least as visually compelling as Solaris or 2001: A Space Odyssey, it has the added benefit of being much less sleep-inducing.

And, being in a generous mood, I’ll forgive that final-reel nod to Ridley Scott’s Alien.

i am jack's unreliable narrator

Comparing Humphrey Bogart’s cool, predatory interpretation of Philip Marlowe in Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep to Elliott Gould’s lonely, mumbling, dislocated version of the same character in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, my thought is that the earlier movie takes Marlowe’s first-person narration in the novels at face value and presents the character as he sees himself, while the later film treats Marlowe as an unreliable narrator and provides a better idea of how he might seem to others.

(Then again, maybe it’s just that Chandler’s hero just seems preposterously anachronistic re-situated in 1973 …)

Noir City Notebook 4: Pushover, Nightmare Alley, Scarlet Street

My experience of the festival rounded out with three exceedingly dark features, including one that I’d argue is an out-and-out masterpiece, Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (third film discussed below):

Noir City Notebook 3: 99 River Street, I Love Trouble

99 River Street and I Love Trouble didn’t strike me as particularly deep, but they were both vastly entertaining: