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 [...]
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"A fast, complex, exhilarating roadster ride through history and time.... Kino is an intoxicating Euro-brew, written with enormous skill and dedication." — Frederick Barthelme
"Jürgen Fauth's deft mashup of genre and historical period is both a full-throttle literary thriller of ideas and a contemplative examination of film and fascism. Kino is a debut of great intellectual force."– Teddy Wayne
"A surprising alternative history. Kino brings the golden age of German cinema to light with loving, sometimes gritty, detail and great precision." – Neal Pollack, author of Jewball.
"A delirious melange of conspiracy, magic, sex, history, bad behavior, and cinema, Kino is a stellar entertainment, and Jürgen Fauth is a writer of rare, sinister imagination." – Owen King, author of Reenactment
"A light-hearted romp that leads straight into darkness and back through the shadows on the wall."– Ben Loory, author of Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day
"Movie nuts arise! A happy and felicitous debut."– Terese Svoboda
All posts tagged noir
The Left Bank Gang
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 [...]
Posted by Jürgen on May 3, 2007
http://jurgenfauth.com/2007/05/03/the-left-bank-gang/
Bound
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 [...]
Posted by Jürgen on April 24, 2007
http://jurgenfauth.com/2007/04/24/bound/
The Ice Harvest
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 [...]
Posted by Jürgen on April 13, 2007
http://jurgenfauth.com/2007/04/13/the-ice-harvest/
The Third Man
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 [...]
Posted by Jürgen on March 1, 2007
http://jurgenfauth.com/2007/03/01/the-third-man/
The Black Dahlia
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, [...]
Posted by Jürgen on January 21, 2007
http://jurgenfauth.com/2007/01/21/the-black-dahlia/
The Good German
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 [...]
Posted by Jürgen on December 6, 2006
http://jurgenfauth.com/2006/12/06/the-good-german/
Tulpendiebe
