[lit-ideas] Re: Movie Night
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 21 Aug 2005 14:27:26 +0100 (BST)
--- Andreas Ramos <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > This is a sentence too far. No it didn't and American Beauty wasn't noir
> in
> > such a "similar" way. (The Maltese Falcon was at least one noir before,
> and
> > Citizen Kane, Chinatown and The Godfather are surely more noirish than
> > American Beauty which is more bourgeois disenchantment a la Desperate
> > Housewives, Six Feet Under, Nip Tuck, etc. than noir. Hell, Miami Vice is
> > more noir even if in garish 80's garb).
>
> Sunset Blvd and American Beauty have the same general structure: the
> narrator is already
> dead when the movie starts. it recaps the last few months of their lives.
> Narrator ends up
> dead.
This similarity is shared with Desperate Housewives. I don't see this shows
that they all further share a theme of "moral decadence" nevermind indicate
all three are noir in any especially meaningful sense.
> The Godfather certainly isn't noir. It's just a standard Hollywood
> bang-bang movie.
A. Don't noir movies often feature bang-bang (and kiss-kiss)? So how does
bang-bang preclude noirishness?
B. The Godfather is plainly not standard Hollywood bang-bang fare. Even the
opening 'I believe in America' sequence begins with a long back-tracking shot
of a face talking to unseen listeners in semi-darkness: this is quite noirish
to say the least, and there is no bang bang til much later; the gangster
figure operating in a twilight world surely can be as noirish as the
detective (who is often on the trail of gangsters)unless we stipulate that
noir is by definition only a detective genre; but then neither Blvd or Beauty
are detective stories in this narrow sense either.
<snip>
> Chinatown has none of this inverted perversion. Just another bang-bang
> movie.
Nonsense on both counts: the Chinatown plot hinges on incest which is as
inverted a perversion as homosexual or old/young liaisons, and indeed it is
incest between old father, daughter and even younger granddaughter. There is
very little bang-bang in it; and it is most obviously a paean to the classic
detective noir movie, however narrowly defined. Sunset is much less obviously
a noir movie in this classic sense, whatever noirish elements it has -
American Beauty even less so.
>Blue Velvet,
> somewhat, but that was mostly a movie for the masses.
This is a side issue (I never raised BV), although 'movie for the masses'?
Please. Unless we mean the perverted masses perhaps.
>Maltese Falcon has a
> substory of
> homosexuality (Joel Cairo as the catamite) but the main story is a
> detective movie.
And why can't this be a noir detective movie? In which case, as it predates
Blvd, Blvd cannot have _created_ the noir genre.
Are only stories with a substory of perversion or homosexuality 'noir'? This
seems to (me, perversely) locate the noir idiom within the realm of submerged
sexual themes (which can be found in almost any movie, in fact in anything
longer than it is wider) rather than as a way to add darkness and shade to
the pursuit or thriller movie (which is often intertwined with romantic and
sexual themes, hence 'kiss-kiss-bang-bang'not being an oxymoron)
Best,
Donal
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