jürgen fauth’s muckworld

Billy Wilder’s timeless noir about the tragedy of fame attained and denied provides up-to-the-minute commentary on the Passion of Lindsay and her latest closeup, but that’s not the angle I’d like to pursue today. Instead, let me draw your attention to a connection that took me by complete surprise last night (yes, I screamed.) Compare and contrast:

Sunset Blvd.:

INLAND EMPIRE:

The film-within-a-film Gloria Swanson and William Holden are watching is a 1929 silent called Queen Kelly. The actress in the movie is in fact a younger Swanson, and Queen Kelly is directed by Erich von Stroheim, who also plays Norma Desmond’s storied butler Max in Sunset Blvd. It’s a delicious bit of recycled cinema that functions as inside joke and helps deepen Norma Desmond’s character.

Lynch’s reasons for quoting both movies halfway through INLAND EMPIRE are more obscure. Because the character, known as the Lost Girl (Karolina Gruszka), is speaking Polish, the caption from Queen Kelly is rendered in subtitles. Without knowing anything about its provenance, I found that it summed up the dark undercurrents of INLAND EMPIRE so well that I used it as a title for my original review.

On frieze.com, Kristin M. Jones writes that “[the Lost Girl] may represent the souls of ambitious actresses stolen by their dreams.” The intrepid interpreters on the INLAND EMPIRE forums believe that the scene is a good starting off point for theories about the film — after all, both Sunset Blvd. and INLAND EMPIRE concern Hollywood stars in spectacular houses with strange butlers, champagne and caviar, and movies that have the power to kill. Like Nikki Grace, Norma Desmond is “a woman in trouble.” Come to think of it, so is Linsday Lohan.

Sunset Blvd. Billy Wilder, 1950. *****

• INLAND EMPIRE on DVD
• Ten minutes of Queen Kelly on YouTube
• Sunset Boulevard on Wikipedia

You never know what you’re going to find at Jim Hanley’s Universe, the comic book store on 33th street with one of the best selections of European graphic novels in the city. Yesterday, I picked up a book by a Belgian artist who simply goes by Jason. The Left Bank Gang reimagines Paris in the 20s as a haven for expat comic book writers in the shape of animals. Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Getrude Stein, James Joyce, Ezra Pound et al. get drunk, make plans for Pamplona, struggle with poverty and obnoxious tourists and discuss the finer points of narrative captions and where do all the erasers go? It’s very funny and endearing, and then the story spins into a fragmented noir. I’ll be looking for more of Jason’s deceptively simple work the next time I’m midtown. You can browse a few pages here.

Jason. The Left Bank Gang. Fantagraphics, 2006. ****

• Jason at Fantagraphics
• Bookslut Review
• Believer Review
• ComicCritique

Movies about The Money are always about Trust, too, and the unofficial theme song of the heist thriller is Bob Dylan’s Absolutely Sweet Marie:

Well, six white horses that you did promise
Were fin’lly delivered down to the penitentiary
But to live outside the law, you must be honest
I know you always say that you agree
But where are you tonight, sweet Marie?

The double-cross isn’t just a staple of the gangster film, it’s built into its DNA in a way that few screenwriters seem to be able to resist. Therefore, it’s a pleasure to see criminals who don’t screw each other over for the loot. For a movie that got attacked for its perceived cynicism, The Ice Harvest put a particularly nice spin on the problem, and Bound surprised us in this regard, too.

You see, trust becomes the central problem in the developing love affair between Gina Gershon and gangster moll Jennifer Tilly when mobster Joe Pantoliano steals a bunch of money, they steal it from him, somebody gets shot, and so forth. A tight, sexy, and violent chamber play, the first feature by the Wachowski brothers has enough clever moments and directorial flourishes to stay entertaining while it lasts. In the long run though, I don’t expect to remember much aside from what the poster rightfully promised: fetishistic images of women in black leather, all tied up.

Bound. Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1996. ***

• YouTube has several home-brewed music video remixes
• Movie Screen Shots has more movie screen shots

It’s the night before Christmas in Wichita Falls, and John Cusack plays a crooked lawyer who runs off with two million in mob money in the first scene of the movie. During a very long night in a very odd town, he has to navigate overly solicitous cops, dangerous strip club owners (Connie Nielsen), an untrustworthy partner (Billy Bob Thornton), and the drunken friend who ran off with his wife (Oliver Platt.) The brisk screenplay by Richard Russo and Robert Benton, based on a novel by Scott Phillips, keeps the movie swerving between outright hilarity and Cusack’s increasing desperation. One of the sharper and more entertaining crime/heist/noirs I’ve seen in a while, The Ice Harvest may earn itself a spot on our list of Christmas movies for cynics.

The Ice Harvest. Harold Ramis, ***

• It’s way underrated at Rotten Tomatoes: 46%
• The trailer

Hadn’t seen this “greatest of foreign noirs” (Bogdanovich) in a good long while, and so I expected the angles and the shadows, Orson and the cuckoo clocks, the Prater and the sewers, the exquisite Graham Greene plotting and cutting repartee, but I had forgotten just how masterfully it all fits together. The German-language bit players are all fantastic, especially Paul Hörbiger and Hedwig Bleibtreu. The last shot got me good, and I have a new favorite line, too: “I had no idea there were snake charmers in South Texas!” Makes The Good German look especially pointless in retrospect. Muckworld trivia: I used to work for a Hispaniola Honorary Consul.

The Third Man. Carol Reed, 1949. *****

• More Graham Greene
• The Third Man on Criterion DVD
• If you haven’t seen the movie, this clip will spoil it. If you have, it’s going to make you want to see it again:

Atrocious. If we’d seen it in time, this movie would have been assured one of the top spots on the list of worst movies of 2006. It’s not just that Scarlett Johannson and Josh Hartnett are fatally miscast–nobody here is pulling off the 40s tough guy/dame thing. Hillary Swank does a mediocre Kate Hepburn impersonation, Aaron Eckhard flounders, and Scarlett certainly ain’t Lauren Bacall. It’s like watching Brick–or Bugsy Malone–except that nobody bothered to clue in the actors. The only scenes that aren’t flat-out laughable are the black-and-white bits with Mia Kirshner.

The Black Dahlia. Brian De Palma, 2006. *

• Rotten Tomatoes: 36%
• Matt Zoller Seitz finds plenty to admire

[tags]noir, thriller, murder, brian de palma, prostitution, cops, los angeles, film, 1 star, hillary swank, katherine hepburn, aaron eckhard, scarlett johannson, lauren bacall, josh hartnett, james ellroy, mia kirshner[/tags]

I fully support all of Steven Soderbergh’s cinematic experiments, whether it’s highly personal weirdness (Schizopolis), big-budget romps (Ocean’s 11), remakes of Russian scifi classics (Solaris), or minimalist melodrama (Bubble). So when he makes a 1940s noir with period technology, I’m very much there. The Good German is set in the heart of what’s called “the Zone” in Gravity’s Rainbow: bombed-to-rubble Berlin in 1945, which is a place very much like Casablanca a few years earlier. Nobody can be trusted, everybody’s for sale, and everybody wants to get the hell out. Clooney comes in as war correspondent, Tobey Maguire plays a hometown boy who might not be as apple-pie as he seems, and Cate Blanchett is the German dame with a mysterious history. It all looks fantastic, and what Pynchonite wouldn’t be a sucker for a plot that involves rocket scientists, the Potsdam conference, and the Mittelbauwerke?

But The Good German has a deadly weakness, and it’s the script. We don’t feel for Clooney, we don’t understand Blanchett, there is little chemistry between them, the tangled plot is so confusing you have to figure it out over dinner afterwards, and Maguire (the best thing about the movie) leaves the story much too early. It’s ok if noir doesn’t make sense right away (Raymond Chandler famously had no idea who killed one of the characters in The Maltese Falcon), but at least the emotions have to be readable. In The Good German, it’s all a blur.

Finally, there are the Casablanca references, which overwhelm the movie. Sure, other films are also alluded to (The Third Man, Psycho), but The Good German starts as faithful recreation of a period movie with contemporary attitudes (more sex than they showed in ‘45 etc), but by the end you feel like you’re watching just another post-modern pastiche–and by god, as much as I love Casablanca, it’s been copied, ripped off, and parodied enough. 

The Good German. Steven Soderbergh, 2006. **

• Rotten Tomatoes: 60%
• Official Site

[tags]steven soderbergh, film, 2 stars, noir, crime, berlin, germany world war ii, george clooney, cate blanchett, tobey maguire, the maltese falcon, thomas pynchon, rocket science, casablanca, psycho, the third man, raymond chandler, postmodernism, pastiche[/tags]

Gene Tierney makes a decent femme fatale in this Otto Preminger noir from 1944, but the plot is pretty lame. Clifton Webb as prissy radio personality Waldo Lydecker holds court in his bathtub, and a young Vincent Price is suspiciously untouched by his fiancee’s death.