Movie Review: Frank Miller's Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (2014)

by Tony Dayoub

Less dense than its already thin predecessor, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For feels like a vast improvement nonetheless. Almost a decade ago, Sin City seemed almost revolutionary in the way it capitalized on then innovative digital technology that allowed directors Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller to shoot their movie on virtual, green-screen sets. Based on Miller's own graphic novel series, the film carried a certain irony. It was a black-and-white film noir homage with a stripped down, DIY sensibility despite hosting a cast of hip actors and utilizing cutting edge filmmaking techniques.

Time is a Flat Circle or: Haven't I Seen True Detective Before?

by Tony Dayoub

When True Detective promos started popping up on HBO months ahead of its debut, it was difficult to figure what it was all going to be about. About all one could dig up was that it was an 8-episode series, shot in Louisiana (employing a few of the actors of HBO's just-cancelled Treme), starring two well-established stars, Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson—neither of whom were on the usual descending trajectory movie stars travel when they decide to move to television—with a title that evoked the pulpy aesthetic of the mystery magazine that ran for decades.

Lost in the Inky Blackness of Fear

by Tony Dayoub

The softly lit visage of fortune teller Mrs. Bellane (Hillary Brooke, pictured above) is a reminder, mid-way through 1944's Ministry of Fear, that director Fritz Lang's films frequently (and almost obstinately) take place in dread-suffused, self-contained worlds. The setting for this noir is no different. An anti-Nazi propaganda film adapted from a novel by Graham Greene, Ministry of Fear plays out as if it were a dark nightmare in the head of protagonist Stephen Neale (Ray Milland). There are markers from the real world sketchily providing a backdrop that is vaguely lifelike. But much like in Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, in which the labyrinthine New York streets don't resemble any Manhattan we're familiar with, Neale's London bears only the remotest affinity to its real-world counterpart.

Now It’s Dark

From prose to poetry: the Blue Velvet: 25th Anniversary Edition Blu-ray

by Tony Dayoub

The first thing that comes to mind when I think of Blue Velvet, surely one of the most significant films of the last 25 years, is something rather ordinary for a movie with so many shocking and memorable images. It is the opening shot. Not the saturated opening shot of the red roses against the white picket fence of the film proper, mind you. I mean the fade up into the image of blue velvet flapping as if being blown by some mysterious wind. Composer Angelo Badalamenti’s timpanists roll right into the plaintive violins of his main theme, paving the way for a solitary clarinet repeating their melody. Initially, the clarinet’s crisp intrusion into the lushness of the violins is as transgressive as that of the film’s main character, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) into the nightmarish beauty of his sleepy hometown, Lumberton. But eventually, the clarinet blends in with the violins, achieving a harmonic unity not unlike the one the naïve Jeffrey does when he gets simpatico with the twisted underbelly of his innocent-looking small town and its frightening denizens.

UPDATED: Blue Velvet 25th Anniversary Blu-ray Giveaway

by Tony Dayoub

One of my all-time favorite films, Blue Velvet, is now available for the first time ever on Blu-ray. A week from today, I should have a review up at my other outlet, Nomad Editions: Wide Screen, where I'll focus on the 50 minutes of lost footage that appears on the disc as a bonus feature.

To celebrate this release, I am happy to give away a free copy of the new 25th Anniversary Blu-ray (courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Inc.) to each of the first FIVE people who can correctly answer a question related to the bonus footage (hint: if you go back through some of my recent tweets you can easily find the answer). But first, the rules:

Movie Review: Party Girl (1958)

by Tony Dayoub

Halfway through Nicholas Ray's Party Girl, the film's big baddie, prohibition-era Chicago wiseguy Rico Angelo (Lee J. Cobb), holds a banquet honoring one of his henchmen. Angelo is the type of street tough you'd expect to find in this opulent MGM picture, one which bears little resemblance to the kind of real-life thug he's meant to represent. Up until this moment in the film, the eccentric Angelo (who we're introduced to at a party he throws for himself after actress Jean Harlow, unknowing object of his affections, gets married) has talked the talk—all "youses" and "dat guys"—but hasn't really come across as very threatening. Even his crippled lawyer, the lame Tommy Farrell (Robert Taylor), is unafraid to openly admit he'll defend the creep, but he won't sit to eat with him because Angelo is a "slob." So Party Girl finally gets a bit of a charge in this banquet scene, where Angelo is awarding an employee with a trophy shaped like a miniature pool cue, before his cadence and demeanor begin to turn from complimentary to seethingly resentful. Anyone who's seen Brian De Palma's The Untouchables will figure out what happens next, for this scene surely inspired it—Angelo begins beating his flunky with the pool cue until the poor sap lays bleeding in front of his horrified confreres.

Nicholas Ray Blogathon: On Dangerous Ground (1952)

by Tony Dayoub

Of all of Nicholas Ray's films, On Dangerous Ground may be the most difficult one for me to objectively get a handle on. It's my favorite of his films because of the duality of Robert Ryan's performance as Jim Wilson, a cop at wit's end with regard to the infectious nature of the corruption and violence he faces on the streets every day. On one hand, a virtuous true believer in the law, and on the other, an enforcer so efficient he will flout the rules to get his man, the short-tempered Wilson can be seen as a natural extension of Bogart's Dix Steele at the end of Ray's last film, In a Lonely Place (though released afterwards, Ground was filmed before Flying Leathernecks). In Ground, Wilson begins at the point where we left Steele in the previous film: an outsider aware of his capacity for violence, unable or unwilling to control his behavior, and resigned to the fact that he should stay away from the rest of polite society. However, reminders like an errant comment from a flirtatious counter-girl at the drugstore, scoffing at the idea of going out with a cop, still sting Wilson.

Nicholas Ray Blogathon: In a Lonely Place (1950)

by Tony Dayoub

In a Lonely Place is a coincident film within the careers of Humphrey Bogart (Casablanca), Gloria Grahame (The Bad and the Beautiful), and director Nicholas Ray; despite being an adaptation of a novel by Dorothy B. Hughes, it is the most personal film for each of the three. For Bogart, the character of alcoholic screenwriter Dixon Steele revealed the real-life vulnerability and mercurial temper that afflicted the actor. In Graham's case, the film highlighted some of her insecurities vis-a-vis her marriage to Ray. And in regards to Ray, its story of a romance gone off the rails paralleled the slow disintegration of his relationship with Grahame while giving us a glimpse into Hollywood's early days.

Nicholas Ray Blogathon: Born to Be Bad (1950)

by Tony Dayoub

A lot of the fun found in Born to Be Bad, a minor film by Nicholas Ray to be sure, is in watching Joan Fontaine subvert her sweet screen persona to play the manipulative Christabel Caine. From the moment she bursts into the life of her publisher uncle's employee, Donna (Joan Leslie)—the jaded city girl Christabel is staying with until she gets her footing in San Francisco—small-town Christabel's default mode of advancing in society is a sort of clumsy, saccharine method of laying love-traps around vain, rich men whose latent attraction to her blinds them to her motives. What else can explain how Donna's fiance, Curtis (Zachary Scott), is the only one to fall for the excessively honeydrippy Christabel?

Nicholas Ray Blogathon: They Live By Night (1949)

by Tony Dayoub

I'm still amazed that They Live by Night is Nicholas Ray's directorial debut. It is an innovative and accomplished piece of work from a man whose previous film experience mainly consisted of assisting Elia Kazan on A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Of course, Ray had spent some time acting in the Group Theatre, roamed much of the U.S. while documenting folk music for the Library of Congress, worked in radio, and even directed a Broadway musical. So at 36, what he most contributed to They Live by Night was life experience. Perhaps this is why one feels that the movie's young couple on the run is doomed to failure: because Ray takes an almost nostalgic perspective in the way he approaches the story, as if recalling better times. Harsh at some points, yet gauzily expressionistic in others, They Live by Night is a romantic fever dream which, as the cliche goes, burns twice as bright if only half as long.

Blu-ray Review: The Killing (1956)

by Tony Dayoub

Queuing up today's Criterion release of The Killing on the old Blu-ray player should be sufficient to hush any Stanley Kubrick naysayers out there. "What naysayers?" you ask. Well, my wife for one, who has always associated Kubrick with a certain pace of interminability best exemplified in her mind by 2001: A Space Odyssey. (The Shining notwithstanding, of course, since she finds the horror film much too disquieting to dismiss so easily.) But there is a minority of movie-lovers who refuse to offer any kind of chance to be won over to this director they ascribe a certain lack of emotion to. For these contrarians, this film noir offers everything they would argue he wasn't capable of capturing on film.

Omega Man

A tough guy’s race to the bottom in the apocalyptic noir Kiss Me Deadly

by Tony Dayoub

Has there ever been a cast of characters more deserving of the nihilistic ending that awaits them than that of Robert Aldrich’s 1955 film noir, Kiss Me Deadly? Revisiting the film on the Criterion Collection’s upcoming Blu-ray (out on June 21) reminded me that, with the exception of a handful of characters I can think of, most of the movie’s players (down to those in the smallest bit parts) are contemptible by design. Kiss Me Deadly was released at the very end of the classic noir period when the many permutations of the form were just about exhausted, and so it is entirely plausible that Aldrich, a relatively new movie director with little more than a couple of Westerns under his belt (starring the often domineering Burt Lancaster), saw an opportunity to shine by pushing the darkness in these odd personages, truly making the movie black as pitch. Deadly’s antihero (emphasis on anti-), brutish private dick Mike Hammer, epitomizes this approach. Already well-known to the public, Hammer was the star of a series of popular paperbacks written by Mickey Spillane. But when Aldrich and screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides (On Dangerous Ground) got hold of Spillane’s detective, they chewed up the gnarly investigator and spit out a twisted grump, amping up Hammer’s already prominent tendencies toward misogynism, narcissism, and sadism to unusually large proportions for an ostensible hero in a mainstream movie of any genre, even the morally complex film noir...

CONTINUE READING AT NOMAD EDITIONS: WIDE SCREEN

Blu-ray Review: Kansas City Confidential (1952)

by Tony Dayoub

And now, for an almost ran... I almost contemplated running a review of the wickedly clever Kansas City Confidential, out on Blu-ray this week, for the Film Noir Preservation Blogathon (see my previous post), sort of "kill two birds with one stone" kind of thinking since I was obligated to write about a review copy anyway. When I suggested it to an editor of mine at another publication—before having watched it for myself, mind you—the guy almost strung me up by my you-can-guess-what. And rightfully so. The quality of this Blu-ray issue from a company called Film Chest is highly questionable, despite being labelled an "Essential" disc by another respected publication I've written for (which also gets it wrong in stating it's a Region 1 disc; it's actually Region 0). True, the film itself is unquestionably essential. Not only is it a perfectly executed example of the web-of-deception-closing-in-on-itself trope so often found in the best films noir; it is an outstanding example of director Phil Karlson's brutal stylings; it's a fine showcase for thuggish character actors like Neville Brand (Birdman of Alcatraz), Jack Elam (Once Upon a Time in the West) and Lee Van Cleef (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly); and it has historical interest due to its obvious influence on Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992).

For the Love of Film (Noir) - Mystery Street (1950)

by Tony Dayoub

This is a contribution to For the Love of Film (Noir): The Film Preservation Blogathon being led by Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films and the Self-Styled Siren, Farran Smith Nehme, with assistance by Greg Ferrara of Cinema Styles.

John Sturges' Mystery Street is often cited as more of a police procedural than a straight film noir. But because of my own Hispanic background I feel particularly attuned to why this is an oversimplification. It's the unusual choice of a Latino for the lead that firmly ensconces the movie in the realm of noir. Mexican actor Ricardo Montalbán plays Boston police lieutenant Pete Morales, a compelling hero who seemingly plays by the book. In some distinct ways, though, he is as much of an outsider as your typical noir hero, marginalized by institutional racism both external and internal.

Movie Review: The Killer Inside Me (2010)

by Tony Dayoub

Filmed once before in the seventies with the more imposing Stacy Keach in the role, Michael Winterbottom's new version of Jim Thompson's novel, The Killer Inside Me, feels creepier because of the casting of the relatively slight and soft-spoken Casey Affleck as the sociopathic Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford. True, the vacant-eyed Affleck played a murderer pretty effectively before as Robert Ford (no relation) in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007). That film's killer, a weak-willed worm with a serious case of hero envy, is driven by emotional problems which are quite easy to quantify. What distinguishes Lou Ford is the lack of emotion behind his congenial nature. This is the coldest nice guy in cinema since Martin Sheen's skinny Kit in Badlands (1973).

Movie Review: In a Lonely Place (1950)

by Tony Dayoub

In a Lonely Place is a coincident film within the careers of Humphrey Bogart (Casablanca), Gloria Grahame (The Bad and the Beautiful), and director Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause). Despite being an adaptation of a novel by Dorothy B. Hughes, it is the most personal film for each of the trio. For Bogart, the character of alcoholic screenwriter Dixon Steele reveals the real-life vulnerability and mercurial temper that afflicted the actor. In Graham's case, the film highlights some of her insecurities vis-a-vis her marriage to Ray. And as regards Ray, it parallels the slow disintegration of his relationship with Grahame while giving us a glimpse into his early days in Hollywood.

Sin City and Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Neglected Value of Artifice in Cinema

There is an interesting debate brewing in my mind after a visit to two little corners of the blogosphere. Should a movie's substantive value be deemed nonexistent simply because style takes precedence in that particular film? Or does the artifice sometimes disguise the substance beneath the style, and perhaps entertainment value also? Admittedly, this is not a new debate. Formalists and realists have been arguing this for a while in some form or another. The germ of this began at Jeremy Richey's Moon in the Gutter where people are arguing about the value of the film Sin City (2005) under a post he entitled Images From The Greatest Films of the Decade: Sin City (A Film Directed by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller) . After I complimented Jeremy on his selection of Sin City as one of the films he honored with his beautiful frame captures, Samuel Wilson commented:

I respectfully disagree. The exact faithfulness of Rodriguez' [sic] adaptation is the movie's great flaw. Comic book dialogue works according to a different narrative logic from movie dialogue. Transcribing Miller's dialogue directly on film ended up sounding stilted to me. I admit also that I liked the Sin City comics initially, but grew tired of Miller's obsessions by the end of the third series -- which does leave possibly the best story, "A Dame to Kill For," to be adapted in a second movie. I can admire the movie visually (those are nice captures) and I suppose it can be appreciated as a formal experiment...

This elicited a comment from J.D.:

Well, the stilted sounding dialogue seemed, to me at least, to be kinda the point, drawing attention to the artificiality of the whole thing - this is, after all, a hyper-stylized world right out of a Mickey Spillane novel. I think that some actors did a better job with the dialogue than others. Clive Owen and Mickey Rourke, for example, fared very well, while Michael Madsen, not so much, but I think that it is more to do with the strengths and limitations of various actors in the cast.

Put me squarely in J.D.'s camp, seeing as how I agree that Sin City is an ambitious attempt to pay simultaneous homage to both the film noir genre and the graphic novel medium. Some of the noir elements are diluted by the time the story reaches the screen, in part because this is a filmed adaptation of a medium that was already adapting a film genre. Post-modernism at its best, no? And J.D. makes a good point. However I feel about the film, he is correct in saying that some actors, Jessica Alba and Michael Madsen in particular, did not serve the material well under the constraints of the screenplay. But does the artifice of the film undermine its value? Film is an inherently artificial medium, and isn't anything put before the lens already influenced unnaturally by the very presence of the camera? So you can see why the argument that a film lacks substance or reality, holds little water with me.



It was with that frame of mind that I must have carried some of this debate over to another site I frequent, Ed Howard's Only the Cinema, where we discussed a better example. When Ed posted his 50 Best films of the 1980s, I was taken aback by the absence of a few films, but when I brought some of them up, amongst them, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Blade Runner (1982), Ed responded:

Tony, some of those I do like but don't consider list material (like Raiders, which is fun but hardly any great masterpiece)... and others I respect but don't have much personal love for them, like Blade Runner... an effects showcase...

Blade Runner has always been and continues to be a flawed film, no doubt. But it did move the cinematic medium forward visually, and has proven to be highly influential. Besides that, it clearly falls into the larger context of film history as a new iteration of film noir (see an earlier post on Blade Runner) much like Sin City does. So it is working on more levels than an ordinary film. And, in my mind, Raiders is a tougher case to argue. As I said in response to Ed at his site:

Sure, it is a Hollywood blockbuster, but it is hardly a trifle in film history. It is a significant homage to an often neglected genre, the Saturday morning serial. It is near flawless in its execution as an action-adventure film. As a suspense thriller, though it may be forgotten after repeated viewings, it rivals the work of Hitchcock (especially in the how-did-he-film-that department). And it doesn't fall prey to the trite dialogue, or wooden characterizations routinely found even in the original Star Wars trilogy.

Ed's response:

Tony, Raiders is undoubtedly a great action-adventure flick. To me, though, the Hitchcock comparison is more revelatory for the differences than the similarities. Hitch was a sublime craftsman with an unrivaled technical mastery, but this formal acumen was rarely used only in service to the suspense or the action. There is invariably something deeper, something of substance, going on in Hitch's best films, whether it's the depth of the characterization, the thematic and psychological subtexts, or, as in Psycho and North By Northwest, a certain playfulness with the formal conventions of genres. As good as Hitchcock was at entertaining, I think he was always conscious of making his films interesting beneath the surface as well. Raiders is all surface. I enjoy it, and I'm certainly not judging it negatively for its popularity, but there's just nothing there beyond a fun adventure. To the extent that the Indiana Jones films have any substance at all, it's in the form of a regressive Orientalism that shows through much more clearly in Temple of Doom but is present in the first film as well.

Let's remember that before Cahiers du Cinema first crowned Hitchcock as an auteur he was often dismissed as a genre director in much the same way that Spielberg has been. Thematically, Spielberg has matured in a way that make his particular concerns much more evident in his recent films, concerns such as his fascination with World War II and Nazi Germany. This theme is treated in a much more adolescent way in his earlier films, 1941 (1979) and Raiders in particular, which were fed by his childhood "education" through movies. His exploration of the effect of the war, and more specifically the Nazis, on his father's generation matures during the course of his career so that by the time he directs Schindler's List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998), he cannot trivialize Nazi Germany nor America's involvement in the war as he does in his earlier films. Seeing as he could not simply get from there to here without an evolution in his art, there is then a value to Raiders of the Lost Ark that deepens once its place in the broader context of Spielberg's filmography is examined, if only to serve as a contrast to his later films. The fact that the film seems to be "all surface", as Ed puts it, is not necessarily so because of the foundation it initially establishes in his progressively conscious thoughts on WWII. So I'd like to hear from my readers on this. Are entertaining films to be dismissed as lacking any substantive value, or might a viewer glean something deeper from them the same way one can in "pop art"? Tell me about some of the movies that you were surprised to find went deeper than you once might have thought. Or tell me why such movies should correctly be viewed as simplistic or superficial.

DVD Review: Blade Runner: The Final Cut - Neo-Noir Lost in Translation?

by Tony Dayoub



Blade Runner: The Five Disc Ultimate Edition was released on DVD in December 2007. Produced by Charles de Laurizika (producer of Twin Peaks - The Definitive Gold Box Edition), it is the culmination of 7 years of hard work to restore this film to Ridley Scott's definitive version.