New York Film Academy’s favorite film noir classics

March 27, 2013 by

This is a paid post, written by the New York Film Academy.

The New York Film Academy is a purveyor of great cinematography of any genre, but faculty staff at the filmmaking school particularly enjoy a good film noir, especially when using it to teach students the nuances of expressionism.

Here we unveil seven of the Academy’s favorite film noir flicks. Where possible, we’ve provided links to the full movies.

“White Heat” (1949, Raoul Walsh)
Starring: James Cagney, Virginia Mayo, Edmond O’Brien

James Cagney gives a matchless performance in “White Heat.”

Heist films don’t get any better than this. “White Heat” is a precursor to many of the great gangster and prison movies of the ’50s, albeit a lot grittier and a lot darker than the films it went on to inspire.

Virginia Mayo is a divine femme fatale, and James Cagney’s performance as psychotic mobster Cody Jarrett is electrifying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghapUv2Tp2I

“Sudden Fear” (1952, David Miller)
Starring: Joan Crawford, Jack Palance, Gloria Grahame

After a string of marvelous hard-boiled flicks with Warner Bros., Joan Crawford left the studio and went on to star in the psychological masterpiece “Sudden Fear.” It’s a great movie and one of the best of Crawford’s ’50s output; it also earned her an Oscar nomination for best actress. Palance received a nod for Best Actor in a supporting role. The film itself rightfully received nominations for best costume design and best cinematography.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ttC8gPoAMA [Read more…]

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COL•COA fest to open with a Danièle Thompson comedy

March 27, 2013 by

One of my favorite film festivals starts in a few weeks. The City of Lights, City of Angels (COL•COA) film festival, a week of premieres in Hollywood, runs April 15-22. Last night, at the French Consulate, the Franco-American Cultural Fund announced the program for the fest, now in its 17th year.

“We are proud to offer the biggest and most exclusive program ever, including, for the first time, a new series that highlights the French film industry’s support of world cinema,” said François Truffart, COL•COA executive producer and artistic director.

COL•COA will feature 38 features and 19 shorts. It opens on Monday, April 15, with the North American premiere of “It Happened in Saint-Tropez,” a Danièle Thompson comedy, starring Kad Merad and Monica Bellucci. The film will be released in France on April 10.

Closing the fest on Sunday, April 22, is the recent French box-office success, “Jappeloup,” directed by Christian Duguay.

Of course, I am most looking forward to the film noir series, which will include “Armed Hands,” co-written and directed by Pierre Jolivet.

More on the fest later; meanwhile be sure to check the COL•COA site and snag your tickets – they will sell quickly!

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Clout’s what it’s all about in ‘The Power Trip’ by Jackie Collins

March 18, 2013 by

Jackie Collins

Reform school or Hollywood? Millions of fans around the globe are grateful that author Jackie Collins – a self-described wild child once upon a time – chose the latter.

“I was always obsessed with Hollywood and America, even as a kid,” said Collins at a media party for her latest book, “The Power Trip,” an event held last month at Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant in West Hollywood. “I used to pretend to be American and tell people my father was in the CIA.”

She immersed herself in the machinations and mysteries of Tinseltown at age 15. It was 1952 and she bunked with her older sister, actress Joan Collins, in an apartment complex occupied by movers and shakers in the making. Says Jackie Collins: “I learned how to drive and I was very streetwise. It was a fantastic place and time. I fell in love with LA and I knew it was where I belonged.”

Living à la “Melrose Place” meant there was no shortage of steamy inspiration. Her first novel, “The World is Full of Married Men,” published in 1968, was banned in Australia and South Africa. Her 29 best-selling novels have sold more than 500 million copies and have been translated into 40 languages. Eight of her novels were adapted for the screen, as films or TV mini-series. Vanity Fair dubbed her the Marcel Proust of Hollywood.

In “The Power Trip,” a Russian billionaire and his supermodel girlfriend invite five high-profile couples to accompany them as they embark on the maiden voyage of their luxury yacht – off the coast of Cabo San Lucas in the Sea of Cortez. Luckily for readers, it’s not all smooth sailing.

Said the ever-glam Collins at the event, her emeralds and diamonds shimmering in the soft light: “I had more fun writing “The Power Trip” than I did with any other book. I want you to feel that you’re there, seeing the white beach and turquoise ocean, sipping champagne in pure luxury.”

She also talked about her organic process – writing in longhand and not using an outline. “I start with a title and the main characters, and I figure it out as I go like a jigsaw puzzle or a tapestry. The piece always knits together. I guess I was a-born storyteller because everything falls into place even though I don’t know what’s going to happen. My characters take me on a trip.”

She writes during the day, records a lot of TV shows (faves include “Revenge,” “Scandal,” “Shameless” and “Dexter,”) and, if she has a spare moment, pins guys on Pinterest. Some of her favorite slices of beefcake are: Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis, Paul Newman, Taylor Kinney, George Clooney and Ryan Gosling. (She also admires Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney as well as Angelina Jolie, Emma Stone and Jennifer Lawrence.)

Speaking of pinable men, she says, “I have a man for every occasion. I was married for a long time [to Oscar Lerman from 1966 until his death in 1992]. Now I live my life like an affluent bachelor.” Her evenings are typically spent meeting friends for dinner or going to parties or screenings. No matter where she goes, she’s carefully observing the scene. “I’m an anthropologist crawling through the jungles of Hollywood. If anything, my characters are toned down – the truth is much more bizarre.

“I always have so many ideas, there are five books I could sit down and write tomorrow. That’s why, I think, I never sleep.” In fact, she’s developing a play, a cookbook, a book of candid photos she shot over the years and an autobiography.

And she reads. “I love tough male fiction,” she says, noting that she’s particularly drawn to authors Joseph Wambaugh and. Elmore Leonard. Every year she rereads “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald and “The Godfather” by Mario Puzo.

That machismo-infused grit often rubs off on her literary creations. One reason Collins connects with so many readers is because she tells stories about tough women. As she says: “My women characters kick ass, they don’t get their asses kicked.”

So does she have advice for a contemporary femme fatale? Of course. “Don’t give up too much on a first date. Don’t wear clothes that are too revealing. Always leave him wanting more.”

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‘Bates Motel’ prequel series starts next week on A&E

March 12, 2013 by

I’m looking forward to watching “Bates Motel,” A&E’s prequel series inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” (1960). Vera Farmiga and Freddie Highmore star; the series starts March 18.

“I got into this wanting to defend who that woman was,” says Farmiga, as quoted in Entertainment Weekly earlier this year. “[In the show] she was just such a beautiful portrait of valiant maternity to me … [it’s] a beautiful love letter between a mother and her son, and that’s that’s how I perceive the character. There’s an Edvard Munch painting of the Madonna. It’s really warped and it kind of exudes the sacred and the profane and it’s just psychologically gripping, and that’s what I was so drawn to with Norma. She’s a playground for an actress.”

You can see a preview of the series here. And for now I’m putting roadtrips on the back burner.

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Friday fashion inspiration from Dita Von Teese

March 8, 2013 by

Dita Von Teese wears a 3D printed dress based on the Fibonacci sequence. Read more here.

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UCLA’s Festival of Preservation delivers two rare film noir titles

March 7, 2013 by

I’m looking forward to seeing two rarely screened noirs – “The Chase” (1946, Arthur D. Ripley) and “High Tide” (1947, John Reinhardt) – at 7 p.m. Sunday, March 10, at UCLA’s Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood. The special guest is Harold Nebenzal, son of producer Seymour Nebenzal, who worked on “The Chase.”

The titles are part of UCLA’s Festival of Preservation, which opened last weekend with a special screening of “Gun Crazy” (1950, Joseph H. Lewis), and runs through March 30.

Based on a Cornell Woolrich novel, “The Chase” tells the tale of a returning World War Two solider named Chuck Scott (Robert Cummings) who’s short of cash and job prospects. Enter Eddie Roman (Steve Cochran), a Miami businessman in need of a chauffeur. Chuck’s cool with the new uniform but before long finds himself in a murderous love triangle with Eddie’s wife (Michèle Morgan). Co-starring Peter Lorre, lensed by Frank F. Planer. (Preservation funded by the Film Foundation and the Franco-American Cultural Fund.)

“High Tide” was the second of two independent crime thrillers produced in 1947 by Texas oil tycoon Jack Wrather. It shares with “The Guilty” the same cameraman and screenwriter (Henry Sharp and Robert Presnell), the same protagonist (actor Don Castle plays a Los Angeles newspaper reporter turned private dick), and the same director, Austrian-born John Reinhardt. Lee Tracy co-stars in “High Tide” as a cynical editor. (Preservation funded by the Packard Humanities Institute and the Film Noir Foundation.)

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Kim Novak, natural-born star, honored with TCM tribute

March 6, 2013 by

One way to Kim Novak’s heart was through first editions.

Airing tonight: Kim Novak: Live from the TCM Classic Film Festival. Taped at last year’s festival in Hollywood, this one-hour interview special kicks off a tribute night to Novak. Here, Michael Wilmington shares his appreciation for this actress.

My favorite Kim Novak line comes in “Pal Joey,” Columbia’s dubiously altered, shamefully bowdlerized but still entertaining adaptation of the great musical classic. Novak’s Linda English says to Frank Sinatra’s cabaret Casanova Joey Evans, in a girlish, amused, deliberately non-provocative voice, “You’re right. I do have a great shape. Confidentially, I’m stacked.”

Kim Novak as Judy in Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” (1958).

Stacked she certainly was: a willowy but sumptuous blonde bombshell with short-cropped platinum hair and a 37-inch bosom that never knew a brassiere (“That’s right!” her “Vertigo” director Alfred Hitchcock once said tartly to François Truffaut. “She’s particularly proud of that!”)

Novak, born in 1933, was a Chicago railroad worker’s daughter and a natural beauty with haunting eyes and a vulnerable air, who became a movie star in her early twenties, with 1954’s film noir “Pushover” directed by her lover Richard Quine.

She then became a megastar with 1955’s “Picnic,” directed by the explosive Joshua Logan, in which – as playwright William Inge’s small-town Kansas princess Madge – Novak danced her way into the hearts and loins of William Holden’s ex-football star/drifter Hal, and many more of the males of a susceptible nation.

Her movies of course capitalize on the classic Novak image: a gorgeous fair-haired girl who’s a little troubled by her own long-legged, statuesque beauty, a bit hesitant about pushing herself forward, slinky and self-conscious, sometimes suspicious of men, a traffic-stopping but vulnerable glamour girl with brains and surprising sensitivity.

Like Marilyn Monroe, who often played it dumb, the real-life Novak was a reader. (Sinatra, one of her dates, wooed her with first editions, while Sammy Davis Jr. hit the jackpot in one of the more famous secret love affairs of the ’50s.)

Kim Novak became a megastar with 1955’s “Picnic.” By 1964, she was considered past her prime.

By 1964, she was considered past her prime and, when she played Polly the Pistol, the girlish hooker (with the belly-button jewel and the requisite heart of gold) in Billy Wilder’s “Kiss Me, Stupid,” she shared in the movie’s lousy notices.

Today “Kiss Me” is rightly regarded as a flawed classic, and if original star Peter Sellers hadn’t had his heart attack and dropped out in mid shooting, we might see it as a masterpiece, as some of the French do (“Embrasse-moi, Idiote!”)

But maybe she was too much a creation of the ’50s, of the last fugitive years of the Golden Age, a kind of platinum blonde Jekyll and Hyde. Kim Novak could play it naïve and lower class, or tony and glamorous, and sometimes she played both in the same movie, as in her masterpiece, as Madeleine/Judy in Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.”

She perhaps wasn’t a natural actress. She gave some awkward performances. But she was a natural-born star. Kim was one of the movie dream girls of my youth, and I still get a pang looking at her. Confidentially, she’s stacked.

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‘Airbrushed Nation’ reveals inner workings of beauty mags

February 28, 2013 by

By Anne Brennan

“Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly.”

That’s a line from Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich.

Despite that warning, there’s something about beauty magazines that is irresistible. What is it about the glossy paper, the aspirational photos, the total escapism?

Thud.

That’s the sound these magazines made when they hit the wastepaper basket after I read “Airbrushed Nation: The Lure & Loathing of Women’s Magazines,” (Seal Press, $16) by Jennifer Nelson.

Nelson is a freelance journalist who has written for “practically every women’s magazines on the newsstands,” according to her About the Author bio.

Just like the pulling back of the curtain in “The Wizard of Oz,” Nelson reveals the inner workings of beauty magazines such as Glamour, Vogue, Self and Ladies Home Journal, also called the “pink ghetto.”

“Let’s get real, ladies, because the magazines sure aren’t!” Nelson writes.

Karlie Kloss

Everyone knows those pictures of Karlie Kloss and Coco Rocha are airbrushed, but that’s just touching the surface. Nelson explores an interesting range of topics within the women’s magazine industry: history, working environment, advertising, fear-mongering and politics, even if most stories focus on the weight and dress size of female politicians.

She finds some positive aspects about the industry, such as … wait, had to page through the book to find an example. Ah, yes, many of the magazines cover social issues and profile everyday women, Nelson says.

One little tidbit in the book stuck out to me. Even the makeup on the cover models, (you know, the “About the Shoot” notes that say Kate Moss is wearing Maybelline lipstick, blush and mascara, etc.) is fake. Editors try to match the shades used by the makeup artist to commercial cosmetic products. Then they say that’s what the model is wearing. No wonder I could never look like Kate, even if I did have the same Cherry in Snow lipstick!

Coco Rocha

As a writer, I was especially interested in the insider look at the editorial departments. Nelson confirmed what I’ve experienced and what other writers have told me. For example, editors only want beautiful “real people” profiled.

Also, I’ve often wondered: How many times can an editor write a version of “thin thighs in 30 days” or “burn belly fat” for a magazine cover? Twelve times a year, it appears.

That said, I was a little disappointed this book wasn’t juicier. I was expecting really outlandish anecdotes, à la “The Devil Wears Prada.”

The only question Nelson doesn’t seem to answer is why we (ok, I) continue to read these magazines. Long ago, when I traveled by T. Rex, we didn’t have the internet. The most beauty, fashion and sex advice I could find other than magazines was Judy Blume’s “Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret?”

Kate Moss

We can get our fix from a multitude of media now. But nothing replaces a magazine for me. Like Nelson says, there is some good writing out there, especially in mags such as O, The Oprah Magazine, More and Real Simple.

So, yes, of course, I’ll pull those glossies out of the trash. At least I can read them with new and informed eyes, which are always un-airbrushed.

Except for maybe my LinkedIn profile.

Gotta do something about that.

Anne Brennan is an Ohio-based writer. It’s always a delight to have her contribute to FNB.

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Happy Oscar Sunday, everyone!

February 24, 2013 by

“Argo” seems a sure bet for Best Picture.

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FNF film noir fest sparkles in the Emerald City

February 22, 2013 by

The Noir City Film Festival and Film Noir Foundation President Eddie Muller will return to Seattle Feb. 22-28 at the Seattle International Film Festival. Eddie will present a selection of films culled from San Francisco’s Noir City 11 including 35mm prints of the FNF’s most recent restorations: “Try and Get Me!” (1950), “Repeat Performance” (1949) and “High Tide” (1948).

There is also a night of African-American noir, including a screening of Richard Wright’s “Native Son” (1951), starring the author. The week winds up with a night of 3-D noir, pairing two of the first 3-D movies of 1953, “Inferno” and “Man in the Dark,” both digital restorations.

Additionally, the FNF and the American Cinematheque will combine forces for Noir City: Hollywood, the 15th annual festival of film noir, which runs April 5-21 at the Egyptian Theatre. Organizers say the lineup includes the FNF’s most recent restorations and several titles never before screened at a Noir City festival.

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