(With Sundance wrapped and an intimidating backlog of films to write about, I’ll be publishing a number of brief capsule reviews over the next few days. If a specific title piques your interest and you’d like to see a more substantial review, let me know in the comments.)
The MIssing Person is a present-day film noir starring Oscar nominee Michael Shannon as a private detective hired to find a man who worked in the Twin Towers. The third feature by writer/director Noah Buschel, Shannon stars as John Rosow, a hard-drinking private detective hired by an unseen lawyer to take a train from Chicago to Los Angeles to follow a mysterious man who’s heading West with a young Mexican child in tow. Along the way, Rosow phone-flirts with the lawyer’s tough-girl secretary (Amy Ryan), gets waylaid by a sexy decoy (Margaret Colin), and befriends a cabbie (John Ventimiglia) who, like him, grew up in New York but had to get away. It eventually emerges the detective and his prey are running from similar things.
A hit at the most recent Rotterdam Film Festival, Paul Krik’s feature debut Able Danger is a Flatbush, Brooklyn set post 9/11 conspiracy tale that hinges its low budget thrills directly to a studied pastiche of classic film noir and a healthy cynicism of our government’s possible role in the events of 9/11 and the subsequent dive into a state of perpetual middle eastern war in the name of defending freedom. Krik, who occasionally goes by the name Dave Herman, has the hip threads and thousand yard stare that are par for the course for Brooklyn conspiracy theorists, but he also has sure handed feel for cinema. With deftness he milks paranoia out of his crisp, hi-def B&W images and creates an altogether plausible conspiracy that barely name checks the controlled demolition theory, but nonetheless synthesizes large quantities of suspicious information from that sunny tuesday morning seven years ago. On the eve of his film’s NYC release at the Pioneer later this week, we caught up with Paul to talk about––what else?–– Entourage, Atlas Shrugged, the desire to work with Cate Blanchett and Greek versus German philosophy.
“I love images of people smoking, and I think [others] find it attractive, even if they don’t smoke — they find it sexy in old movie images. It’s so iconic, not only for film noir but for old movies. What’s better than a femme fatale with a cigarette dangling out of her mouth? What better image?” — Bruce Goldstein, curator of the NYC Noir festival which begins this Friday at Film Forum, quoted by The Reeler.
“We discourage depictions of cigarette smoking in Disney, Touchstone and Miramax films. In particular, we expect that depictions of cigarette smoking in future Disney branded films will be non-existent.” — Disney president and CEO Robert Iger, quoted in a press release announcing that Disney will no longer include images of smoking in films released under the Disney label.
Other than that, today’s clip should speak for itself.
Today would have marked the 100th birthday of Barbara Stanwyck. Perhaps the greatest tough-cookie of an era in which tough-cookies were in no short supply, Stanwyck worked steadily from the 30s through the 60s. She had a rare gift for adopting the expected conventions of any given genre, while maintaining her signature blend of wise-cracking sensuality and drowsy hostility.
Some of Ms. Stanwyck’s must-see performances are screening on Turner Classic Movies today and tonight; though I’d prefer to watch Howard Hawks’ Ball of Fire, the gem of the program is probably Baby Face, which airs tonight at 8pm EST. Baby Face was the ultimate pre-Code picture, and one of the least morally defensible products of Warner Brother’s early-30s stab at social relevancy. Stanwyck plays Lily, a saloon maid who, perhaps too-loosely interpreting the advice of her Nietzschean mentor, “accidentally” kills her father and, with her handservant/only friend in tow, hightails it to the big city to commence sleeping her way to the top.
The film was so racy in its original incarnation that when it was initially released in the relatively-wild pre-Code era, significant cuts had to be made to appease the censors. The original cut was found and screened at Film Forum in New York last year; as the New York Times‘ Dave Kehr put it at the time, “with its five full minutes of sleaze restored, it has to be seen to be not quite believed.”
For more on our girl Babs, check out these tributes from around the web:
“[I'd] rank Stanwyck\’s abilities above that entire Picturegoer list, even above Garbo, who was an instinctual actress and not the superb technician that Stanwyck was.” — Self-Styled Siren
“She was a great star, and also happened to be a rock-ribbed right-winger and anti-communist
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
filmcouch-114
A hit at the most recent Rotterdam Film Festival, Paul Krik’s feature debut Able Danger is a Flatbush, Brooklyn set post 9/11 conspiracy tale that hinges its low budget thrills directly to a studied pastiche of classic film noir and a healthy cynicism of our government’s possible role in the events of 9/11 and the subsequent dive into a state of perpetual middle eastern war in the name of defending freedom. Krik, who occasionally goes by the name Dave Herman, has the hip threads and thousand yard stare that are par for the course for Brooklyn conspiracy theorists, but he also has sure handed feel for cinema. With deftness he milks paranoia out of his crisp, hi-def B&W images and creates an altogether plausible conspiracy that barely name checks the controlled demolition theory, but nonetheless synthesizes large quantities of suspicious information from that sunny tuesday morning seven years ago. On the eve of his film’s NYC release at the Pioneer later this week, we caught up with Paul to talk about––what else?–– Entourage, Atlas Shrugged, the desire to work with Cate Blanchett and Greek versus German philosophy.
