| On Dec 11, 7:06 pm, Agent Smith wrote: Quote:moviePig wrote: moviePig wrote: I wonder if film noir may be experiencing a recent resurgence, and the movies that make me think so are No Country for Old Men, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, LA Confidential, Get Shorty, its sequel & it's titular rip-off Get Carter, The Lookout. What other such films have I forgotten, since, say, LA Confidential won the Oscar? Hell, I think even Memento was film noir. :] THE LOOKOUT and L.A. CONFIDENTIAL maybe... but surely not NO COUNTRY, KISS KISS, or SHORTY. Afaik, noir takes more than a wry plot with a less-than-ebullient outcome. E.g., you need fatalism... and underexposed film... Well, Roeper and Friend pronounced both No Country and Kiss Kiss to be noir, and Shorty was written by Elmore Leonard. I think that's enough to make them noir. I've read tons of Elmore... without ever once thinking of noir, iirc Of course, I certainly wouldn't gainsay Roeper (at least without a nearby Friend of my own)... but I think noir is about streetlamps and/ or headlights, usually reflected in wet asphalt, and about bleak quests where happiness is always near, behind doors always locked. (And btw, NO COUNTRY's shortcoming, imo, was that it went "noir" for only 3 minutes.) Lighting is the most notable ingredient for making film noir, but by no means the only one. Noir is like alcoholism - somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five 'indicators' are possible, but you really only need about five of them, to be in that category. GOOD GERMAN is indeed noir (almost campily), and pretty much gives us Soderbergh's definition of it, I bet. But one of those qualifying ingredients, maybe even more essential than lack of shadow detail, is an ongoing sense of inevitable doom, surrounding all desperate attempts to evade it. One's mileage may vary, but I got little of that in COUNTRY... and, in KISS KISS, I was rotflmao... -- - - - - - - - - YOUR taste at work... http://www.moviepig.com |