> On Jul 14, 2:07 am, AlbertClarkson aol.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>

>> To me obviously "The Rockford Files" in not a few of its eps venerates
>> the seminal noir tradition: it's a hip extension. For example, we've
>> already talked about Cannell doing this in such eps as "The Attractive
>> Nuisance" and "Paradise Cove." Here he's showing a little humorous
>> reverence as well as some parody that feels just right for the
>> changing times and audience.

>

>> I think it's interesting to look at, and compare to TRF, other kinds
>> of "neo noir."

>

>> Two that I've seen lately, much more contemporary than TRF but showing
>> the durability of noir, are "The Black Dahlia" and "Where The Truth
>> Lies." The critical reception for both was mixed, at best. The general
>> rap on DePalma's rendition of James Ellroy's "Dahlia" is that it falls
>> short of Ellroy's "L.A. Confidential" in its movie version. The
>> negatives on Atom Egoyan's "Where The Truth Lies" is that it is too
>> complex.

>

>> Actually, I thought "LA Confidential" was pretty obvious early on. You
>> just know that Hollywood's standard thrust in almost every film that
>> includes the police procedural aspect--"Dirty Harry," "Serpico,"
>> "Training Day," "Zodiac," "LA Confidential" etc. etc. etc. will have
>> the erstwhile police hero discover that the most villianous adversary
>> is not the criminal but the police buraucracy and that often that
>> bureaucracy is the collapsing spine of an even larger villany, City
>> Hall and municipal politics, and that the Thin Blue Line not only does
>> not protect and serve but is lazy, corrupt, etc. Being a cop IS the
>> problem for our hero out to defend society. Usually, in the last reel
>> (to borrow an older technological cliche) our hero leaves the force,
>> having become disillusioned but also having come of age. Same
>> storyline over and over. "LA Confidential" is transparent from the get
>> go; just a short-term matter of figuring out which cop is the bad guy.

>

>> Probably the predominant mainstream critical negativity toward "Truth"
>> and "Dahlia" is alone a strong recommendation for both movies. ("8
>> Millimeter" was generally attacked by mainstream critics as too mired
>> in sleaze, and I think it's a superb noirish update; Joel Schumacher
>> outdoes himself here, hearkening all the way back to classic stuff
>> like Dante in the general tried-and-true storyline of the Descent-Into-
>> Hell drama.) Mainstream critics are, in my view, mostly airheads,
>> compromised by their institutional constraints in which they'd better
>> damn well live if they expect to have access to Hollywood and hence
>> remain on their newspaper or magazine or cable TV payroll next week.
>> Take Leonard Maltlin. He's useless; his "Maltin" moments for DTV
>> movies are ridiculous: not wanting to end up working at Ace Hardware
>> ("That's an insect repellant bulb, Mam"), Leonard, like cheerleader
>> Rex Reed of earlier fame, hasn't met a movie he hasn't liked in a long
>> time, certainly not for DTV. With Ebert missing, Roeper has had some
>> real turkeys on with him as co-hosts of late as they give thumbs up to
>> some real stinkers, like animated abominations which seem a plague
>> visited upon us these days as the studio suits strangle drama and
>> risky creativity out of Hollywood fare and pretarget as their audience
>> the people who can't tell Jaywalking Jay Leno who is buried in Grant's
>> tomb, this because the conglomerate monsters in the dark suits and
>> thin ties make life miserable for those comparatively lowly Hollywood
>> studio suits at the dreaded quarterly financial meetings where all the
>> conglomerate divisions are compared as to their bottom lines. "Mr.
>> Murdoch, sir, I'm sure our next quarter will be much more profitable."

>

>> "The Black Dahlia" finds DePalma telling too many stories
>> simultaneously, but the Linscott family is an unforgettable discovery
>> of noirish monstrosity, and Fiona Shaw as Mrs. Linscott, on camera
>> only a short time, is just superb as the chief monster, albeit one
>> who, like Chandler's murderess Carmen Sternwood, might well baffle
>> Freud and Darwin as to the morbid psychology--maybe inscrutable, not
>> merely mysterious--behind her nightmarish but frighteningly and
>> pathologically natural savagery. From the time you first see her,
>> everything else in the movie seems to fall into place, though this
>> works on you "subliminally" to begin with in the dinner scene at the
>> obligatory noir mansion in which she first appears, far, far into the
>> movie, which I think is a high achievement in noir, for she is hardly
>> to be unanticipated in the hallmark of great noir where you think upon
>> encountering her, "Yes, I might have expected her because of what's
>> already happened" or the equivalent "Well, she doesn't surprise me."
>> Like Noah Cross in "Chinatown" and the Ganolfini character in "8
>> Millimeter," she shows that often the most hardboiled detectives are
>> not quite prepared for the most awful monsters and attendant realism
>> they dramatize about the darker proclivities of Homo sapiens. I can't
>> think of anyone in all of DePalma nearly as frightening, and though
>> this movie is "uneven" (which often means it just takes awhile for the
>> whole thing to become unified in your mind which, if you are generous
>> in your retrospective, I will be), it has in the last 1/3 to 1/4 part
>> of the story what is to me one of the unforgettable and most powerful
>> dramatizations of noir you are ever likely to see. I don't think
>> you'll forget Mrs. Linscott any time soon; the terrible images and
>> scenes stay with you. DePalma superbly renders the look-and-feel, the
>> dark (literally, "black") atmospherics, of noir, like the night scenes
>> do in "Paradise Cove."

>

>> But I guess most of today's "neo noir" isn't partly humorous like TRF.
>> It tends instead to blend in more in these nastier times than a touch
>> of the horror film. "Dahlia,' as you probably know, is based on the
>> notorious, appalling Elizabeth Short murder in LA in the 1940s. (The
>> great film, "True Confessions," also incorporates this terrible murder
>> and offers its own speculative explanation for that case that remains
>> unsolved to this day and surely will never be resolved).

>

>> "Where The Truth Lies" is, to me, a superb Atom Egoyan film, also neo
>> noir. And what do you know? There's a ghoulish strain of the hip TRF
>> humor in it: the butler did it! There is a great parody of the
>> archetypal gangster, in a modern dark way not less than at least a
>> distant kin of the Manett et al. mobsters in TRF: I laughed at the
>> Egoydan prototypical gangster, and I knew I was supposed to. Kevin
>> Bacon (who gets off some great, morbidly funny lines), Colin Firth and
>> especially Lindsay Lohan are excellent, to my taste. It's a solid
>> storyline, based on a dark, noirish view of Martin and Lewis when they
>> were doing their twosome act. There's also a grim, cynical take on the
>> Cinderella myth that underlies so many chick films; Cinderella has
>> become very worldly and saavy; she doesn't need the fairy godmother
>> any longer.

>

>> I'd recommend these two movies for TRF fans.

>
> Uh.................should we have tacos with these?- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -