“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:

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:

Noir City Notebook 2: Desert Fury, Leave Her To Heaven

The idea of technicolor film noir strikes a lot of people as a contradiction in terms, and, yet, how else to classify these two …?

Noir City Notebook 1: Thieves Highway, Woman on the Run, Pitfall

I’m pleased to say that I ended up seeing even more of the Noir City festival than I’d initially planned, last week: ten films noir from the ’40s and ’50s, some of them exceedingly rare, as well as Robert Altman’s 1973 The Long Goodbye. I’d meant to post notes as I went, but better late than never, right? These were my impressions of the first three pictures I saw during the festival: