I asked you a simple question! Do you love her? YES! But don't hold that against me, I'm a little screwy myself!

Monday, November 28, 2005

This Is How Hard I Rock


Which 1980's Hair Band Are You?

Monday, November 21, 2005

Here We Go...

You'll have to pardon me.

The moment we seal away the left over turkey in Tupperware, I enter Curmudgeon Mode, and it's not pretty. I wage open war against Christmas. I want to be nice, but I can only manage naughty.

I decided, then, to try to stave off my crankiness with a list of things that I should continue to be thankful for after I've shoved away from the table on Thursday evening. I'm obviously grateful to have awesome friends and a killer grad student lifestyle (no, really!), but this is about the little things:

1. Purple Rain/Prince and the Revolution: It's the only soundtrack to my life that has nothing to do with my life. And it makes me think of family. When I was a lass, my mother and I cleaned the house to the strains of "Darling Nikki." That's right, the song Tipper Gore protested for the sake of children everywhere. I played broom guitar to that song and went on to have a 4.0 average throughout my grade school career.

Thanks, Prince and the Revolution.

2. Cake: Sweet, delicious, calorie-free when shared with friends. Also the name of a sweet, delicious, calorie-free band. Coincidence? I think not.

Thanks, Cake.

3. Online quizzes: I like to say I don't ever get bored, but there are moments where I have no idea what to do with myself. An online quiz can put me back on track. I've learned from scientifically trained Tickle associates that I am "smart 'n' sexy" and my animal magnetism is equal to that of a penguin's. And penguins are so hot right now.

Thanks, online quizzes, you're a pal.

4. Um, well--I really can't think of a number 4 because the holiday season ticks me off that much. And you know why?

1. Christmas songs: Can you think of anything creepier than "Carol of the Bells"? I think not. Go ahead, start humming it to yourself. Didn't the hairs on the back of your neck go straight up?

Shut up, carols.

2. Retail chicanery: You know, there are no real deals or steals until after Christmas day. Those store managers put up all that POP to trick you into buying things you and your family don't need. Actually, that doesn't bother me as much the fact that Target is now so crowded I can't wander the aisles without bumping into a woman and her cartload of demanding children.

Shut up, capitalism.

3. Cheese: Yuletide cheer? Good will toward men? God bless us everyone? Stop it.

Shut up, lameness.

4. Winter: It doesn't matter how high the you turn the thermostat. Your feet will remain frozen until teaser-spring in March.

Shut up, ice and snow.

5. Christmas songs: Maybe if Prince released a funky holiday album, I would be able to stop humming "Carol of the Bells."

Why can't we just have Halloween twice?

Duly note that I did try that whole Happy Holidays thing. I will be Grinching out in my apartment until Christmas Eve, plotting surefire methods to steal your Christmas. You have been warned.

Friday, November 11, 2005

"Does your super sleuth kit come with a decoder ring?": Finding noir in the most obvious places

If you’ve ever watched a cheesy sitcom (and come on, you have), you know that there’s some unwritten law that each one has to have a film noir episode. It begins with canned chuckles as the lead sits behind a desk in a darkened PI office while he simultaneously voices over a flat-toned narration. Inevitably, a woman walks in, his wife or girlfriend from the show, dressed up 40s style and acting like she doesn’t know him. The joke, of course, is to have the sitcom characters enact every film noir cliché possible while at the same time remaining themselves and dishing forth whatever shtick they’ve established for the characters. Though these exercises in ‘hilarity’ draw on the elements of film noir and evoke the aesthetic blatantly, no one would for a minute confuse them with the real thing.

The Singing Detective, starring Robert Downey Jr., functions on the same principle. Dan Dark (Downey) spends the movie in a hospital bed recovering from a debilitating skin disease. As he does so, he imagines himself and those around him into a parodic and undeveloped film noir story. Just as the sitcom, The Singing Detective relies on the audience’s ability to immediately recognize the noir aesthetic being so obviously employed.

The Singing Detective is one of several movies I’ve seen in recent years that use a film noir aesthetic as a device to achieve other ends, the latest being another Robert Downey Jr. film, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. These movies are not actually trying to be film noir or neo-noir, but call upon audience recognition of film noir tropes to speed their way into expressionism or metaphor.

In doing so, they must push the noir to an extreme that would have been impossible during the 1940s and 50s when film noir originated. They therefore call on the grittier model of the pulp fiction novels of the same time period. In Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, the corpse of a girl that Val Kilmer’s character fishes out of a pond has no panties on, as evidenced by an unglamorous close-up. The Singing Detective revels in harsh sex scenes and shows Robin Wright Penn’s character being drowned in a bathtub in one of the opening scenes. In Sin City, Elijah Wood plays a sadistic cannibal while Nick Stahl embodies a deformed child molester. One of the most (unfortunately) memorable scenes in Mulholland Drive involves a rather close look at a corpse rotting in a dark apartment.

The most obvious attributes of film noir cinema are chiaroscuro lighting and the voice-over. The Singing Detective, Mulholland Drive, Veronica Mars (a TV show, but of the same tone), and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang all employ this lighting to different degrees, but it is Sin City that pushes it further. Instead of just using harsh light to obscure parts of faces and create long shadows, Sin City is filmed as a live action comic book--mostly in black and white, but with splashes of solid color. These emulate the light/shadow effect of chiaroscuro lighting while at the same time washing the movie in hyperreality.

Veronica Mars, The Singing Detective and Sin City all favor their audiences with terse voice-over narrations, from Veronica, Dan Dark and various characters in Sin City's vignettes. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, however, features Harry Lockhart's neurotic, self-conscious narration and revels in his meta-narrative awareness. Harry tells his story in stops and starts, at one point rewinding the movie to add in something he forgot and noting, at another, things that will be important later.

Every noir film focuses around an urban landscape of corruption and shady characters in shady alleys. These recent films seem much more likely to choose Los Angeles as that landscape than the original films of the 40s and 50s, which often favored New York or Chicago. The high contrast between the bright sunny California days and the dark corrupt dealings of the Hollywood studios are particularly suited to the film noir genre. Recognizing darkness inherent in Hollywood’s beauty market, Mulholland Drive’s noir dream centers around an overly complicated and mysterious farce of mob control over film casting. In Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Harry’s character is drawn to L.A. to participate in a casting fake-out to snare a big star. Dan Dark adds to his other dark fantasies in The Singing Detective when he imagines that his wife and her (fictional) lover are stealing his screenplay. And in Veronica Mars, it is the large disparity between the rich (including Hollywood elite) and poor that causes the town’s noir tensions.

It is on these landscapes that the gritty horrors of noir play out. The true hallmarks of the genre are the jaded characters that people it. These are bruised and hardened denizens, haunted by pasts. For Veronica Mars, it is the brutal murder of her best friend, Lily Kane. For Dan Dark, it is his childhood memories of his mother’s infidelity, forced flight to the city, prostitution and murder. In Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Harry’s paramour Harmony is propelled by the fact that her sister was victim of a child molestation that Harmony was unable to prevent. Mulholland Drive is a deceptive layer cake of pasts. The first two-thirds of the move are constructed around Diane Selwyn’s turbulent failed relationship. It is a dream, a fantasy collage created to gratify and comfort her. Within it, the object of her desire, Camilla, is transformed into the amnesiac Rita, helpless and haunted by an irrational remembered fear.

With pasts as tragic and painful as these, noir characters act out against the absurdity of existence and are driven by the need to resolve them. The past and the present become inextricably linked, from the way in which Veronica is treated at her high school after her father’s disgrace as sheriff to Dan Dark’s inability to see his wife as anything other than a cheating whore because of his mother’s indiscretions. The pulp detective stories that Harry and Harmony idolize as children play an important part in their adult noir drama. In Sin City, Hartigan plays out a drama over the span of a decade, saving a little girl from a molester and later protecting her as a young woman from that molester turned into a monster.

Unable to free themselves of the past, noir characters operate in a deterministic universe. Their fatalism is complete with the knowledge that bad things will continue to happen regardless of their actions. In Veronica Mars, this presents itself as Veronica’s detachment and jaded awareness of the class warfare between haves and have-nots in Neptune. In Mulholland Drive and The Singing Detective, Diane Selwyn and Dan Dark construct their noir worlds for precisely this aspect. The exaggerated determinisms of their alternate über-noir worlds, the dark networks of shady men, indicate Diane and Dan’s desires to believe that there are external causes for their miseries.

Having captured both the more and less obvious aspects of noir, these films use them for varied purposes. As mentioned above, Mulholland Drive and The Singing Detective use noir as an expression of their main characters’ disillusion and pain. In the same way, Sin City is an exaggeration of the noir aesthetic to such a degree that it becomes expressionism, completing the circle and taking the genre back to its German expressionism roots. For Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Veronica Mars, however, noir is used as a tool to emphasize the harsh realities inherent in growing up or old. The distinction between these modern films and those they emulate is subtle but apparent. In these, the film noir worldview is not soaked through, but is instead slipped on over other things. In sitcom versions, noir is caricatured. These films are not that far from a similar action, though they use noir for more sober and complicated purposes.

Wednesday, November 02, 2005

"Love Never Dies," Right? (OLL #5)

"I have travelled across oceans of time to find you..."

Gary Oldman, Gary Oldman--

What are we going to do with you?

To celebrate Halloween I rented "Bram Stoker's Dracula," starring you, Winona Ryder, Sadie Frost, and Keanu Reeves. My feelings for the film have begun to waver; it gets cheesier by and by. However, I can't understand the way I feel about you, Gary Oldman. What are you?

Are you hot or not? I can't figure it out.

In "Dracula," you are brutally hot, despite the fact that you're wearing a top hat and crazy-long hair--and sometimes a monster face. It's all that love-talk, all that passion. It's lame for an aged vampire to weep for his mortal beloved, but you sold it.

Your hotness-in-question bore me through that abominable version of "The Scarlet Letter." Yes, that is my "I [Heart] Dimmesdale" t-shirt. Puritan ministers never looked so good. And you as Sirius Black in "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban"? Gary Oldman, I'm so Sirius-ly. Get it? Yeah, I know, bad joke, but your hotness made me do it.

But then you become Commissioner Gordon in "Batman Begins." I didn't even know you were there. Because you weren't... hot. And was that actually you in "The Fifth Element"? Because also not... hot. And what was happening to your hair and your face in that Beethoven movie? Not hot. You also chose to be Lee Harvy Oswald in "JFK," which means you were advancing toward not-hotness. On purpose.

I'm confused, Gary Oldman. I think I know how I would react to certain celebrities if I met them on the street. For example, I'd try to be cute and clever for someone like Jake Gyllenhaal. I'd do the whole wigging out groupie thing for Rasputina. (Don't judge me.) But you--do I check you out? Do we strike up a discussion on Classical drama? I just don't know because I don't know if you're hot or not.

Gary Oldman, help. Take a stand. Be decidedly hot or decidedly not. Either way, I'll love you the same.

Sirius-ly,
Sam