Film Noir

Posted on March 12, 2007 by sheila

Rob has a terrific post up about the newer film noir movies (I seriously could sit around and talk about Mulholland Drive and what the hell was going on in that movie for hours) .

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7 Responses to Film Noir

  1. JFH says:
    March 12, 2007 at 3:03 pm

    Am I the only one that gets Mulholland Drive, Mulholland Falls and Millers Crossing mixed up?

  2. Rob says:
    March 12, 2007 at 4:22 pm

    I can understand mixing up Drive and Falls. The only thing they have in common is the name, though. I had to look up Miller’s Crossing. It looks familiar but I can’t quite decide if I’ve seen it. If I did, I don’t remember it.

  3. Rob says:
    March 12, 2007 at 5:06 pm

    Did you read any of the reviews of MD at IMDB, Sheila? Stuff like this:

    “the crypticness comes from a chopped-up and rearranged plot combined with a very long and rather explanatory fantasy sequence and not from a chaos of visual allegory. Because of the limitation of length, I will try to keep this short and to the point and touch on the major concepts”

    Solid gold. Not sure what that means but I think he got more out of it than I did.

  4. red says:
    March 12, 2007 at 5:12 pm

    Ha!! For me, I basically stopped worrying what that movie was about … and just got into what I felt it was telling me. It was like a dream – and sometimes when Lynch does that it gets annoying – but with Mulholland Drive I was HOOKED.

    Like I said to you in the email: the scene in the dilapidated vaudeville house – with the singer – and Naomi Watts and the other actress weeping and clutching each other in the seats … I don’t know (with my brain anyway) what’s going on there … but on a deeper level, I DO know. It’s beyond wonds. To me, the movie works at that level and I never get sick of it, weirdly.

    And I didn’t find the chopped-up plot a problem … for me, the whole movie was about identity. Personality. Self.

    So to suddenly rearrange everything – and see it all anew – as though the Naomi Watts we thought we knew is now someone totally different – I always find that really upsetting (in a good way).

    But like I said to you before – hahahaha – I could never write a thesis paper, pinning down what all of that crap means. It’s more of a dream-space kind of logic. I don’t know what symbolizes what, etc. I just know that (for me) it totally works.

    I’ve never seen Mulholland Falls, actually – that’s Nick Nolte, right?

  5. Rob says:
    March 12, 2007 at 5:14 pm

    To pull out a Big Chill quote (Always appropriate in my book): “Sometimes, you have to let art flow over you.”

    Yes, Falls is with Nick Nolte.

  6. red says:
    March 12, 2007 at 5:16 pm

    hahaha I can so hear Bill Hurt saying that.

    For me, it’s true with Mulholland Drive … not so with other movies where I just get annoyed, when the director relies on tricky stuff to keep me on edge – as opposed to really creating a sense of suspense …

  7. Steve Ely says:
    March 12, 2007 at 7:58 pm

    Thanks for the pointer to those. I’ve been meaning to see Romeo Is Bleeding for a long time now. I’ll have to put Mulholland Falls and Hollywoodland in that list now, too.

    Sheila, I asked this on Rob’s post, too, but on the subject of modern noir, have you seen Brick with Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

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