noir Tagged Articles at Cinematical

All I had to hear was "classic monsters," "film noir," and "comic book" before I was interested. Yep, that's all it takes, filmmakers ... but this one sounds like it could be very fun indeed. Looks like Kevin Grevioux, one of the co-creators of the whole crazy Underworld series, is tackling a new project that will make the Vamps vs. Lycans trilogy look like a rainy day at the zoo. Sources indicate that the project "brings back many beloved classic monsters including Frankenstein's Monster, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Invisible Man, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde plus many more, in a re-imagined contemporary setting."

The project is called I, Frankenstein, and will be based on Grevioux's upcoming comic book of the same name. On board to direct is Rise of the Lycans helmer Patrick Tatopoulos, and producers include Chris Patton and Robert Sanchez of Death Ray Films, as well as our old pal Ryan "STD" Turek! Obviously we're in the (very) early stages of this multi-medium monster mania, but for a bit more on the concept, the characters, and some nifty character images, check out the reports at FEARnet, Shock, and Dread.

But of course this thing could go either way. It could be the horror equivalent of Hellboy and The Dirty Dozen Meet The Maltese Falcon ... or it could be Van Helsing vs. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. And nobody wants that. Obviously. What say you?

I don't pretend to be any sort of scholar where film noir is concerned, but like most movies geeks of a certain age, I was bitten by the bug and went a little crazy. All of a sudden my Netflix queue was swollen with films by Jules Dassin, Robert Siodmak, and Anthony Mann. I must have gone through at least 50 titles, but my very favorite remains the first noir I ever saw: Otto Preminger's practically perfect Laura. As most old-school movie freaks can tell you, film noir generally deals with several key components: Crime, paranoia, sharp shadows, hard-boiled dialog, elaborate conspiracies, femme fatales, sudden violence, and a foreboding sense that fate is a cruel mistress indeed. (Like I said, I'm no scholar, but you can get a great noir lesson right here.)

But nowadays we don't seem to have much use for film noir, unless (of course) it's used as a stylistic choice in movies like Sin City and Watchmen. (Hey, I guess Frank Miller and Alan Moore dig film noir, so maybe you should too!) And then there are indie films like The Perfect Sleep, which aim to come across as both a traditional film noir and an affectionate homage / satire of the genre at the same time. If the flick is just a bit too clever for its own good on one or two occasions, well, I suppose that's preferable to most movies, because they're generally way too stupid for their own good.

Film noir can be painful when it's done poorly, but overall, there really doesn't seem to be enough of it out there. Sometimes, you get something as straight-faced and reverent as Brick, and at others, you get goofy-but-affectionate riffs on the genre like Assassination of a High School President and South of Heaven.

So it's nice to hear something about The Missing Person out of Sundance or, in today's case, a title called The Perfect Sleep. Twitch, as reliable a geek barometer as any, has shared the trailer with us, and I suspect that we're looking at a stylish return to that "straight-faced and reverent" thing I was just bringing up. A nameless man (screenwriter Anton Pardoe) looking to fight his way through thugs and assassins alike to get back to that one dame (Roselyn Sanchez, and who can blame him?) -- can you get more noir than that?

Sleep apparently opens in Los Angeles on March 13th, with its New York bow to follow a week after and Chicago, Dallas, and Portland after that. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to find out what my Orlando contacts know about a missing movie...

Not long ago, we featured a noir-style fan made poster for Transformers, created by this dude Timothy Lim. Now, thankfully, Lim has gone and created another gem -- this time for Terminator, with text by John Liem. And it's important to point out the text because it's absolutely perfect for this poster, and totally captures this vintage noir-type vibe. I feel like they don't make many cool movie posters anymore.

I forget where I read a recent complaint about this (feel free to point me in the right direction), but this person was saying how one of the great things about heading to the movie theater used to be to see which cool new movie posters they had on display. These days, it seems studios are obsessed with the floating heads, and, with the exception of a few, there's just way too much junk out there. Bring back the cool movie posters! Check out a larger version of this Terminator poster (and the previous Transformers poster) in the gallery below, and you can buy a print of the Terminator one over here.



[via Superpunch]

A number of films in recent years have been playing with the conventions of film noir. Starfish Hotel, which screened at Fantastic Fest this week, uses those conventions to turn a mystery inside-out, but unfortunately isn't nearly as suspenseful or interesting as its predecessors.

Arisu (Koichi Sato) is a big fan of mystery novels, particularly the Darkworld series written by Jo Kuroda (Kazuyoshi Kushida). Arisu has a secret life of his own: he's been cheating on his wife with the lovely Kayoko (Kiki), whom he met at the faded and remote Starfish Hotel. Suddenly Arisu is involved in a deeper and more horrible mystery: his wife Chisato goes missing, and is rumored to be working in a Tokyo brothel. A seedy-looking guy in a rabbit suit (yes, very much like Donnie Darko) keeps popping out of nowhere to drop hints about the mystery. The guy in the rabbit suit says he's advertising the newest book in the Darkworld series ... or is he really from the Darkworld himself? Is Arisu's life turning into a Kuroda mystery novel? Flashbacks and dream sequences further blur the lines between fantasy and reality, both for the characters and the audience.

Watching Lights in the Dusk, the latest feature from prolific Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki, you could be forgiven for thinking someone has slipped Quaaludes to the entire cast of a 1950s noir film. Everyone moves carefully and very slowly, while the entire city of Helsinki seems to be under a blanket of silence and isolation. Indeed, apart from the film's cast, the city appears to be deserted: There are no passers-by, no irate motorists, and no nosy neighbors. Just the movie's handful of gangsters, along with the social detritus with whom they casually become involved.

The film centers on Koistinen (Janne Hyytiäinen), a man so forgettable that, after three years in his night security job, his supervisor still asks his name when he signs out for the evening. As played by Hyytiäinen, Koistinen is aggressively Keaton-esque, both in his immovable visage and his expression of constant concern -- the worried creases between his eyes never lift. It's as if he's got secret knowledge that, any minute now, something awful will happen. And, after the first few minutes of the film, we understand Koistinen's worldview: He's greeted with instinctive disgust everywhere he goes, even by those who don't know him. Prepared as he is for constant disaster, however, Koistinen greets each new slight with nothing more than a sigh, and his only response is to make himself less conspicuous.

At its start, Don Siegel's The Lineup comes across as an unusually well-written, smoothly directed police procedural. Opening with a sharply constructed suitcase snatching at a busy train station, the movie quickly introduces us to Lieutenant Ben Guthrie (Warner Anderson) and his partner Al (Emile Meyer, whose speaking voice sounds uncannily like that of John Spencer), a pair of middle-aged, seen-it-all cops. The two have an easy partnership, and though their dialogue is sometimes overly expository, the way they enter rooms, and relate to other cops is strikingly natural and realistic, showing the attention to detail that a big studio like Columbia could afford to give even its smallest pictures in the late 1950s.

As Ben and Al wend their way through the bag-snatching case, they discover drugs hidden in the stolen bag, and their suspicion gradually shifts from the thief (who killed a cop while fleeing the scene) to the suitcase's owner (a smarmy, too-smooth opera singer who has "guilty" written all over him, and yet somehow isn't), and finally to a large crime syndicate, victimizing innocent travelers by turning them into drug mules who unknowingly import product from Asia. Just when the movie seems to be settling into a typical police procedural mold, however, the camera shows us Eli Wallach on a plane, studying grammar. His name is Dancer, and he's an unsophisticated thug trying to learn how to fit into the upper classes; he's with an associate named Julian (the wonderful Robert Keith, a long way here from the tough-guy cop he played in Guys and Dolls just three years earlier), who is older, smartly-dressed, and George Sanders-aloof. And, suddenly, everything changes.

If 1958's wonderful Murder By Contract is any indication of director Irving Lerner's talents, it's a crime that he's not better-known. Made on a shoe-string budget with a group of solid, no-name actors, the film is an entirely original look at the life of a hitman, from his first job to his last. Lerner tells his story with a remarkably economy, shaping characters and scenes with little to no dialogue, and wasting no time with unnecessary introductions. Combined with that business-like coldness, however, the film offers a surprising sense of humor that gives it a depth that few of its low-budget, no-name companions could match.

Murder By Contract is the story of Claude (Vince Edwards), a man whose normal, stable, mainstream life isn't earning him the money he needs to move ahead in life. His primary focus is buying a house for himself and his unseen girlfriend, and he decides the most practical path to that goal is contract killing. Claude is meticulous and infinitely patient; in order to become a better killer, he trains himself not to feel, and to kill only with tools that are not illegal (knives, his hands, etc. -- no guns). When he feels he is ready to begin work, he contacts Mr. Moon (Michael Granger), a man who, though he denies any knowledge of the dark things at which Claude hints, agrees to call him -- eventually. And only once. The scenes of Claude waiting are among the best in the film: Virtually wordless, they are brief, poetic glimpses into his soul, and elaborate more fully on his character than pages of dialogue ever could. In just a few shots, we see his limitless patience, his focus, and his determination; by the time Mr. Moon calls, only three or four minutes of screen-time have passed, but we know Claude well enough to understand exactly why he chose contract killing as his key to the future. Nothing affects him: Not stress, not the passage of time, and not doubt.

There are many things you can get out of six years on a sitcom. Cash; a comfort-zone; a catchphrase. Having a career afterwards – especially at a young age – doesn't normally come in the same package. Joseph Gordon-Levitt went from Third Rock from the Sun and Treasure Planet voice-overs to sex and death in Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin and taking punches to avenge his dead girlfriend in Rian Johnson's Hammett-meets-high school film Brick. In San Francisco, Gordon-Levitt spoke about reading screenplays, small-scale moviemaking and the benefits of passion.

Cinematical: When you first read the script for Brick, did you have any – I almost want to say warning – about the nature and character of the material, or did you just dive into it?

I had no idea what the script was; I opened it like any other script, going 'I wonder what this is. …' and by the time I was through page three, I was flabbergasted. People don't write movies like this anymore. People try to create movies through digital effects and camera tricks – and not that there aren't really cool camera tricks in Brick, but none of them are digital. Rian Johnston, the writer-director, he created the world of Brick with his words … and no one tries to use words anymore; it's like a dying art, the wordsmith. And the language that he came up with for Brick is so fun to say that when I was done reading it, I turned over the last page and went to the front again and started reading it again, just because I liked saying it.

I think this is an incredibly cool idea: movie-style promo trailers for books. I don't know if there have been others, but this trailer for Will Christopher Baer's Kiss Me, Judas is outstanding. It's in Italian (choose the "bassa risoluzione" option - the note says "If you want to live, call 911"), but you can pretty much get the gist of what the story is about (guy meets sexy girl in bar, has sex with her, ends up in bathtub with his kidney gone - a twist on the old urban legend). I've seen ads for video games before movies in theaters, but I like the trailer-for-book idea even better.

And if you haven't read Kiss Me, Judas, go get it now. It's a brilliant, brutal (but somehow beautiful) modern noir, the first in a trilogy (followed by Penny Dreadful and Hell's Half Acre). The movie version is in the works, and a comic will be released next summer.