Angel ,'Conviction (1)'
A place to talk about movies--old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
Speaking of retro-noirish things...
God, I love Miller's Crossing! Why doesn't Marcia Gay Harden get any work? She's such a badass. Plus Gabriel Byrne's best role by far. He just burns a hole in the screen. That's what I think of when I think of Black Irish.
Why doesn't Marcia Gay Harden get any work?
Curse of the Best Supporting Actress award?
Thankfully Judi Dench seems immune to that particular hex. Maybe it was the brevity of the role she won it for?
I expect her Britishness has something to do with it, as well as the habit of the British film industry to deem leading roles by ladies of a certain age to be commercially viable.
Also, Crosetti, uh, I mean, Jon Polito, whom I found a talented little salami-brain who got shafted by Fontana. Uh, and I don't mean porn.(in reference to Miller's Crossing.)
I loved M for the crazy art deco sets, the darkness at its heart, the hall of the mountain king, the film noir tropes it created, and, especially, the mock trial.
Yes, this. It helps to see a good print--before the restoration from a few years ago, I only saw it on PBS with a really horrible print (scratchy images with subtitles that would bleed into the starkly white portions of the screen). I've been meaning to buy the Criterion DVD to replace my videotape I purchased of the restored version.
Lang definitely uses a silent-film approach to the movie which I found hypnotic. At first, I thought the grostequeness of the middle/upper class to be over the top, but it provides a neat counterpoint with the seedy underclass.
What are the wittiest movies of the past 25 years? Is wit dead?
The Coen Brothers do wit well (and sure, sometimes poorly). The aforementioned Miller's Crossing is abundant in wit. Whit Stillman's pictures are also well-soaked in wit. Winterbottom's Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story was very witty, as well it should have been.
But wit mostly lives on TV now, in Arrested Development and both versions of The Office.
I haven't seen much of Arrested Development, but is The Office witty? The goal of The Office (and most contemporary humor, it seems) is to make one feel clever by making fun of how stupid other people are. Wit, on the other hand, is actually being clever.
Not that any form of humor is inherently better; I'm just tired of seeing the former and want to see more of the latter.