Suspenseful, subversive ‘Blue Velvet’ continues to beguile

December 15, 2011 by

Blue Velvet/1986/MGM/120 min.

David Lynch

In “Blue Velvet,” writer/director David Lynch dazzles and disturbs us as he probes the evil beneath the surface of sunny small-town Americana. Twenty-five years later, its trippy shimmer has not dimmed, reminding us of Lynch’s auteur power. (The film was released last month on Blu-ray.)

Setting the action in Lumberton, N.C., a real-life city with a retro vibe, Lynch introduces us to Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), a college student with an Eagle scout vibe. Jeffrey stumbles into a sordid mystery when he discovers a human ear lying in a field.

As he investigates, he’s aided by cute, cheerful Sandy Williams (Laura Dern), who is also the police chief’s daughter, always a plus when you’re short on clues. Jeffrey quickly finds that the bloody trail of badness traces back to Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), a psychotic abuser you’ll never forget.

Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern

Top on Frank’s list of victims is a sad and broken nightclub singer named Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), who sees death as her salvation. As Jeffery is pulled into Frank’s world, he finds himself falling for both Dorothy and Sandy, slowly spiraling until he meets the ugliest side of his soul.

The nightmarish world of “Blue Velvet” is a perfect melding of sly, suspenseful tone, subversive storytelling and marvelous, beguiling images that only painter-turned-filmmaker Lynch could concoct. There is baseball, apple pie and Chevrolet. There are also curtains, stages, disguises, halting juxtapositions.

Jeffrey finds the rank, insect-infested ear just seconds after a beautiful shot of brilliant color – red roses, a white fence, pure blue sky. Savage violence co-exists with moments of buoyant charm. (Compare the slow-motion shots of friendly firemen waving at us with Dorothy’s unrelenting degradation.) Lynch ferrets out the good guys’ guilty secrets and furnishes warped humor – such as the camp comic relief from Frank’s bisexual friends, including a twisted impresario played by Dean Stockwell.

The performances are particularly haunting. Fresh out of rehab, Hopper shrewdly saw that the role could launch a comeback for him. In the DVD extras, Rossellini recalls being moved by Hopper’s talent as he let tears fall down his face.

Rossellini brings uncommon depth and richness to her breakthrough American role. (Lynch originally wanted Helen Mirren). Ideally cast, MacLachlan and Dern nail their parts as well – soft-spoken and gentle straight-shooters who spend much energy suppressing their turbulent, darker desires.

Now 25 years old, “Blue Velvet” remains weird, wild, risky and wonderful.

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‘Blue Velvet’ quick hit

December 15, 2011 by

Blue Velvet/1986/MGM/120 min.

Baseball, apple pie and Chevrolet. Gangsters, stray body parts and sadism. Writer/director David Lynch takes us on a journey to the seedy side of small-town America. Laura Dern is a sweet and sheltered high-school student. Her wholesome boyfriend Kyle MacLachlan can’t resist prying into the secrets of mysterious chanteuse Isabella Rossellini and her malevolent boyfriend Dennis Hopper. Disturbing, surreal, thoroughly mesmerizing.

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Noir City Xmas conjurs holiday spirit with a dash of darkness

December 13, 2011 by

The Film Noir Foundation is hosting its second NOIR CITY XMAS on Wednesday, Dec. 14, at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre. Before the show, the foundation will unveil the full schedule for the NOIR CITY X film noir festival, January 20-29, 2012, at the Castro.

Here are foundation’s descriptions of the flicks:

First on the bill, at 7:30 p.m., is Charles David’s “Lady on a Train” (1945). Nikki Collins (Deanna Durbin) witnesses a murder while waiting for a train, but can’t get the police to believe her when no body is discovered. She enlists the help of a mystery writer to sleuth out the culprits on her own. This wildly entertaining mix of comedy, music and suspense features a superb cast of sinister and suspicious supporting players.

Robert Siodmak’s soul-crushing “Christmas Holiday” (1944) follows at 9:20 p.m. A young soldier gets more than he bargained for on a holiday stop-over in New Orleans when he is introduced to a young “singer” (prostitute) and a local “nightclub” (brothel) and he learns the tale of her descent into degradation. Deanna Durbin is memorable in her first adult role, and Gene Kelly is unforgettable as the murderous cad with whom she tragically falls in love.

Tickets available at the door the day of show, $10 for both screenings.

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Dreary, draggy, drawn-out, ‘I Melt with You’ is one to avoid

December 10, 2011 by

I Melt with You/2011/Magnolia Pictures/129 min.

I knew I was in for a long slog early on in “I Melt with You,” a noir-infused drama about an annual reunion of four 40something yuppie buddies, when one of them delivers this clunker: “Some things never change.”

Granted, writer Glenn Porter might be trying to indicate how stilted these relationships have become, but the mere fraying of friendship is incidental in comparison with the dreary nihilism that unfolds.

The friends are played by Thomas Jane, Jeremy Piven, Rob Lowe and Christian McKay; Mark Pellington directs. There is no shortage of generic male bonding and trying to talk during their stay in idyllic Big Sur – all through the blur of heavy drinking and drugging, music blaring, natch. (The movie’s title refers to the Modern English song from 1982; it was rerecorded for use in the film.)

Through this blur of excess, which would be nauseating if it were a little less boring, their Important Issues emerge: a broken marriage and washed-up career, stale grief, unchecked greed, chronic womanizing (shocker!) and a shelved dream.

As we learn more details about their histories and their current situations, we see that whatever they were in college, they are now angry, mean-spirited, self-indulgent, entitled, whiny dullards. When their drawn-out and draggy self-destruction becomes literal, prompting a local cop (Carla Gugino) to start asking questions, it’s hardly much of a loss.

I’m not really that hard to please. A little humility from a few of the characters, a whiff of intelligence, passable writing or solid acting might have redeemed this film somewhat. But, with the exception of McKay (who played Welles in “Me and Orson Welles”), the acting is risible. For example, when Piven’s character is called a rat, he actually begins twitching his nose and baring his teeth.

“I Melt with You” doesn’t melt fast enough – it’s a chore to endure.

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A must-see, ‘In Darkness’ is uncompromising, deeply moving

December 9, 2011 by

Michael Wilmington

In Darkness/2011/Sony Pictures Classics/145 min.

By Michael Wilmington

Sometimes we let the horror of the past recede into a comforting mist of remembrance, melancholy and well-meaning cliché. We shouldn’t.

Agnieszka Holland’s “In Darkness” is a drama of the Holocaust, and a remarkable one, even given the high standards set by other real-life World War II film chronicles like “Schindler’s List” and “The Pianist.” The movie – which is Poland’s official submission for this year’s foreign language film Oscar – is almost fearsomely realistic, horrifically uncompromising and deeply moving.

Holland’s film, like Steven Spielberg’s and Roman Polanski’s, is based on a true story, a tale of terrible anguish, fear and, finally, of profound humanity. But it’s done with an excruciating physical realism those other two movies didn’t really try for.

“In Darkness” is based on the true story of a small time criminal and burglar named Leopold (Poldek) Socha, who used his day job as a sewer inspector in Lvov, Poland, during the German occupation, to hide a small group of Jews in the sewers for 14 months. As we watch, we are plunged into an abyss of fear and suffering, lit by faint glimmers of incongruous hope. It is a great, stark, sometimes awesomely emotional film, with an incredible lead performance by the Polish actor Robert Wieckiewicz as Socha, and brilliant, penetrating direction by Holland.

Agnieszka Holland

Holland and her crew, especially cinematographer Jolanta Dylewska, make this experience so gritty and tactile that it almost hurts to watch it. The sewers of “In Darkness” are not like the sinister, shadowy and strangely romantic Viennese sewers of Carol Reed and Graham Greene’s masterful 1949 film noir “The Third Man,” those vast echoing tunnels through which Orson Welles ran like a rat in a maze.

Nor are they stark and grim and deadly like the Warsaw sewers where the anti-Nazi Polish partisans hid in Andrzej Wajda’s 1956 WWII-set masterpiece “Kanal.” The sewers of Lvov are smaller and inky black, steeped in an airless-looking gloom, cramped and comfortless, wet with sewage and slime. They are true hell-holes, and the people hiding there are a mismatched crowd of businessmen, operators, snobs, adulterers, families and even children.

There is daring Mundek Margulies (Benno Furmann), who twice eludes the Nazis. The Chiger family – father Ignacy (Herbert Knaup), mother Paulina (Maria Schrader), daughter Krystyna (Milla Bankowicz) and son Pawel (Oliwier Stanczak) – are a tight-knit group, being pulled apart.

They have entered this hell out of desperation. All around them, before their voluntary imprisonment begins, other Jews are being arrested and taken to the death camps, or shot on the streets or killed in the forests, as we and Socha see in the movie’s shattering opening scene.

Their “savior” Socha, isn’t acting out of the goodness of his heart. He does it for money and, when the story begins, even shows signs of anti-Semitism, something typical for many Catholic Poles (like Socha) in that era. As the months go on, as Socha has to feed and watch over the fugitives, reassure them and provide their only link to the outside world of daylight and fresh air – as he has to resort to ever more dangerous ruses to keep them all hidden – we see him change. Socha is a crook, but he’s also a fearsomely competent man, someone who dares to do what others can’t, and that very competency eventually helps humanize him, while as the Nazi “efficiency” turns them into monsters.

Robert Wieckiewicz as Socha leads the group into the sewer to hide.

Eventually Socha’s Jews run out of money and he must make a decision: to abandon them or to go on hiding and helping them. What he chooses to do, why he chooses to do it and what eventually happens make for an astonishing and inspiring story.

Socha’s story in fact provides something relatively rare in our movies: a true story of moral growth and redemption under the most extreme and terrifying conditions – centering on a character who initially seems far from heroic, even if he’s gutsier and sharper than the Nazis he keeps outwitting.

Playing this meaty role, Wieckiewicz gives us a human being so real and so full of seeming contradictions that he ultimately shocks us with the sheer human truth and rough grandeur of his performance. The rest of the cast are all fine, especially Furmann as Mundek and Michal Zurawski as Socha’s Nazi buddy Bortnik. But it’s Socha’s movie and he wins us easily, while always, like any great actor, letting his cast-mates shine as well. This movie is an extraordinary work, a link to the past. You feel it in your heart and soul and senses. And it demonstrates something we sometimes forget: Agnieszka Holland can be one of the world’s great filmmakers. [Read more…]

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Film noir gifts for the holidays: Makeup and fragrance

December 8, 2011 by

Bulletproof notes include tea, woods and cedar.

With socializing and chic travel in full swing, you may be looking for a few new additions to your makeup bag or stand-out presents for your beauty-addict chums. Here are my suggestions.

Tailor-made for wicked women is Tokyo Milk’s Femme Fatale collection, eight new fragrances with names like Crushed, Excess, Arsenic and, my favorite, Bulletproof. Fragrance notes too are uncommon: smoked tea, coconut milk, crushed cedar and ebony woods define Bulletproof, for instance. And the design is divine!

A three-piece Femme Fatale set runs $65 and includes 2 ounces of eau de parfum, 3.4 ounces of shea-butter hand cream and one .70 ounce lip elixir/balm. You can also buy items individually. (The photo shows two versions of the hand cream.)

No-fuss drama by Hourglass.

Dior plays the blues.

Hourglass Film Noir Lash Lacquer, $28. Take your look up a notch for nighttime by creating high-drama eyes. Like gloss for the lashes, this Vitamin E-enriched lacquer can be worn alone or over mascara to add a little (or a lot of) shine. “The results are stunning, almost cinematic,” says Hourglass CEO and founder Carisa Janes.

OK, so frosty blue became a hideous icon of the ’70s. But midnight blue has always given inky black a run for its money. Look at the gorgeous color in Dior Blue Tie Essentials and you’ll see why. The gleaming chunky container also houses a square of pretty pink lip color. Regularly $70, this is selling online for $40, but is going fast! Try Bloomingdale’s.

Metallics, martinis. Life's good.

Lancome's lovely set.

Pressed for time? Add instant glitz with a quick metallic dusting on your brow bones and cheekbones with Bobbi Brown’s Martini Shimmer Brick, $40. Also makes a festive gift for a friend.

Hypnôse Drama mascara is the star of this four-piece set from Lancôme, selling at Nordstrom for $29.50 ($68 value). That said, the amazing eye-makeup remover very nearly steals the show and I’m so excited to find it in a travel size! The set includes:

– Hypnôse Drama mascara in Excessive Black
– Travel-size Cils Booster XL mascara base
– Le Crayon khol eyeliner in Black Ebony
– Travel-size Bi-Facil Double-Action eye-makeup remover (1.7 ounces).

L’Oréal Infallible gives a soft sheen and lasts several hours.

Chanel's coveted gloss.

Smoky eyes call for subtle lips and L’Oréal Infallible lip gloss, $12, does the trick. Designed to last for six hours, it’s also a lip plumper. For me, Infallible hasn’t quite lasted the full six hours but it’s easy to apply, feels good on, and comes in a bunch of cool colors. Shown here is Suede.

Chanel’s holiday 2011 collection is breathtaking! You’ll find there’s much to covet and, if struggling to decide, you can’t go wrong with Glossimer lip gloss in Sparkle D’Or, $28.50. On its own or over a red lipstick, Glossimer is sleek, smooth and vibrant.

Being good is so overrated.

Be red-carpet ready with Revlon's Silver Screen.

Want to inject more zest into your office holiday party? Mix it up a little with Good Girl Gone Bad nail polish by Deborah Lippmann, $16. Or choose from the new holiday shades, which are “dripping in glittery excess,” as noted on her company’s site. Gotta love that this time of year, no?

I also love Lippmann’s success: she started her own line of products in 1998 after her flair for nails and color caught on with celebrities and fashion houses (Versace, Valentino, Balenciaga, Donna Karan and Zac Posen).

A stunning red by Nails Inc.

Revlon Silver Screen polish, $6, is a versatile metallic that picks up tints of pewter, shiny gray and muted lavender depending on the light. I can’t find this shade on Revlon’s site, which I found plodding and cumbersome, so I would suggest buying it at your local drug store.

Need a gift for your mani-pedi buddy? Try Nails Inc. London polish in Charing Cross – an irresistible red that Santa’s elves must be scurrying to stock. Company founder Thea Green was honored in June with a MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) for her outstanding contribution to the beauty industry. This polish is $19.50 at Sephora.

Precious Oud is a perfect holiday splurge.

Fracas evokes vintage charm.

Tuberose, jasmine, jonquil, lily of the valley, white iris and pink geranium – must be Fracas, the classic fragrance by Robert Piguet, a legendary French designer who mentored Hubert de Givenchy and Christian Dior among others. Said Dior: “Robert Piguet taught me the virtues of simplicity through which true elegance must come.”

Neiman Marcus is selling Fracas sets (3.4-ounce eau de parfum spray and a 6.5-ounce body lotion) for $120. It’s a super deal because that’s the usually the price for the eau de parfum alone.

Such a pretty bottle and an uncommonly sophisticated, slightly exotic, scent (spicy florals with vetiver, wood and patchouli): Precious Oud eau de parfum by Van Cleef & Arpels, $185, at Neiman Marcus.

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Free stuff from FNB: Win four Bogie and Bacall movies!

December 6, 2011 by

The Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall set features four great movies.

I have a great Christmas-bonus giveaway this month: The Bogie & Bacall Signature Collection DVD set. The set includes these thriller/film-noir classics from the 1940s:

“To Have and Have Not,” 1944, by director Howard Hawks

“The Big Sleep,” 1946, Howard Hawks

“Dark Passage,” 1947, Delmer Daves

“Key Largo,” 1948, John Huston

(Anita is the winner of the November reader giveaway, Criterion’s DVD edition of “The Killers.” Congrats to Anita and thanks to all who entered!)

To enter the December giveaway, just leave a comment on any FNB post from Dec. 1-31. The winner will be randomly selected at the end of the month and announced in early January. Include your email address in your comment so that I can notify you if you win. Your email will not be shared.

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McQueen paints harrowing portrait of addiction in ‘Shame’

December 2, 2011 by

Steve McQueen and Michael Fassbender

“Shame” by London-born writer/director Steve McQueen is a searing study of a man, both buttoned-up and out of control, obsessively seeking oblivion and teetering on the edge of disaster. A sex addict perpetually on the outside looking in, he lives solely for his next physical encounter.

On the surface, the laconic, hauntingly good-looking Brandon (Michael Fassbender) seems very much together. His colleagues like and respect him, he lives in a stylish Manhattan apartment, women are easily drawn to him.

His sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan), a struggling singer, is not faring as well and lands on his doorstep because she has nowhere else to live. Starting with Brandon finding Sissy in his shower, the two begin a tense co-existence. Brandon attempts to keep his porn, rooftop trysts and hotel hookups private, but we sense Sissy is completely up to speed on his compulsion; she tries half-heartedly to curb her own partying and sleeping around.

Whereas Brandon strips any feeling from his encounters (the one exception is a colleague he courts, the ethereally pretty and warm-hearted Marianne, played by Nicole Beharie), Sissy is the opposite, fiercely clinging to whoever will buy her champagne and share her bed for a night. Sissy’s mounting desperation eventually forces Brandon to confront his self-destructive compulsion.

With muted emotion and spare dialogue, McQueen, who wrote the screenplay with Abi Morgan, implies more than he tells but we know with certainty that Brandon and Sissy’s history is rooted in pain and deep dysfunction. The scene in which Brandon and his boss (James Badge Dale) come to hear Sissy sing at a club – she performs a wrenchingly sad version of “New York, New York” – flawlessly conveys their baggage and buried guilt.

McQueen, an acclaimed artist and director of 2008’s prize-winning “Hunger,” which also starred Fassbender, heightens the mood of numb despair by using long takes, cool tones and stark lighting. Toward the end, in bed with two women, Brandon’s anguished face tinged with yellow brings to mind a tortured figure in a Hieronymus Bosch painting, expunging any hint of sexiness or erotic allure.

Nicole Beharie and Michael Fassbender

Noirish shots of Brandon prowling New York streets at night reveal the energy he expends to shroud his life in secrecy and keep his emotions at bay.

There are many graphically raw scenes that earned the film a NC-17 rating and many are harrowing to watch. Harrowing, to be sure, but also moving – Mulligan and Fassbender are marvelously compelling in these roles that let them express uncommon depth and a mighty struggle. Beharie and Dale strike us as real people as opposed to stock types, yet they neatly suggest the general pattern of Brandon and Sissy’s superficial relationships.

To some extent, “Shame” follows in the tradition of “The Lost Weekend” and “The Man with the Golden Arm,” as well as “Last Tango in Paris,” but McQueen’s work seems broader, more resonant in our instant-gratification, must-have-it-now culture. Says Fassbender, “It speaks to this constant drive we have for satisfaction and highs, one that is followed by feelings of shame and self-loathing.”

“Shame” also speaks, in tough language, to vulnerability, damage, connection and love.

Tilda Swinton plays a beaten-down mother.

Also opening today (in a limited release) and very highly recommended: “We Need to Talk About Kevin” by Lynne Ramsay, a thriller in which neo noir meets New Age parenting. We witness, in jagged pieces that jump back and forth in time, the unthinkably brutal rupture of a dysfunctional but not entirely unhappy family.

Tilda Swinton plays a mother struggling to love her son Kevin (Ezra Miller) who comes into the world seething with anger. John C. Reilly plays her denial-prone husband. Though the script isn’t fully there and I just couldn’t buy Swinton and Reilly as a couple, this is nonetheless tour de force direction from Ramsay. I hope her vision and style are recognized during awards season.

Rich with visual metaphor, bold use of color and captivating performances, this is destined to be a neo-noir classic.

Emily Browning

In writer/director Julia Leigh’s erotic reworking of the fairy tale “Sleeping Beauty” we meet Lucy (Emily Browning), a perverse college student using her stunning looks to make a living in the sex industry.

Though I admired Browning’s performance, the movie was disappointingly sluggish and dull.

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Honey, your December horoscope is here …

December 1, 2011 by

Julie Delpy

Marianne Faithfull

Fate reigns supreme in film noir, but that doesn’t mean we don’t love us some zodiac fun. Hope your December is full of expensive champagne, exquisite gifts and elegant entrances to parties. And happy birthday, Sagittarius and Capricorn! A special shout-out to Sag stars Julianne Moore (Dec. 3), Kim Basinger (Dec. 8), Julie Delpy (Dec. 21) and Vanessa Paradis (Dec. 22); and super-sexy Caps, the late Ava Gardner (Dec. 24), Sienna Miller (Dec. 28) and Marianne Faithfull (Dec. 29).

Sagittarius (November 23-December 22): Charismatic and funny, Sag values intelligence and fresh perspectives. Diligent portion control followed by triumphant shopping these last few weeks have been well worth the effort. You are being noticed even more than usual so try to be fair and carve out a little time for the slew of people wanting to socialize. That said, it’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind. Remember that mid-month when you feel bound to do something simply because of a crossed conversational wire. A brilliant idea occurs to you around the 12th.

Capricorn (December 23-January 20): Possibility abounds now and in the New Year. Don’t concern yourself with what’s realistic, feasible or practical. There will be plenty of time for thorough scrutiny later on but, at this juncture, dream big and think boldly. It will come together one piece at a time. On the romantic front, you may be tempted by a coy boy; enjoy the dalliance without rushing into anything. If attached, celebrate your passion, hell, get creative. The holiday-party circuit will keep you extra busy and may open new doors. [Read more…]

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Film noir feline stars: The cat in ‘Postman Always Rings Twice’

November 30, 2011 by

More on the most famous kitties in film noir …

The Cat in “The Postman Always Rings Twice” 1946

Name: Sasha Pirster

Character Name: Curiosity

Though her screentime was brief, Sasha Pirster made a memorable impression in "Postman."

Bio: “I like cats, they’re always up to something,” says the motorcycle cop as he looks admiringly at a full-figured kitty climbing a ladder in “The Postman Always Rings Twice.” Directed by Tay Garnett and based on the famous novel by James M. Cain, “Postman” is a seminal film noir.

Sadly for Curiosity (Sasha Pirster), platinum blondes with nice legs are also always up to something. The blonde in this case is Cora (Lana Turner) who plots with her lover Frank (John Garfield) to kill her husband Nick (Cecil Kellaway). Curiosity is on screen only long enough to be noticed by the cop and make Frank nervous before she meets a rather brutal end.

The lovers’ first attempt to do away with Nick is staging an accidental drowning in a bathtub. But when the power fails, their plan is foiled and poor Curiosity, who happened to be an innocent bystander, is electrocuted. “I never saw a prettier cat,” says the cop. “It killed her deader’n’ a doornail.” This strange omen does not deter the killers in the least and they proceed to Plan No. 2.

Lana Turner

Despite her character’s grim fate, feline actress Sasha Pirster was a joy to work with. Known for her wry one-liners and practical jokes (she was fond of offering cash rewards for mittens), Sasha was popular with both cast and crew.

In fact, Lana Turner was between husbands during the filming of this movie and the two actresses frequently went out on the town; their drink of choice was kahlua and cream. It was on one of these outings that Sasha met the love of her life, a wealthy fish merchant (well, ok, he was a fat cat) named Felix Kurllup, whom she married in 1947.

Sasha said goodbye to acting and became a homemaker; the couple had 13 children. After raising the kittens, she launched a popular line of turbans inspired by Turner’s elegant toppers in “Postman.”

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