Word: noir
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...BOTTOM LINE: Rock noir: Baerwald's songs are pitch black as they spin toward pop apocalypse...
Triage resonates with the kind of frustrated compassion that underlies film noir. Movies seem to be the deepest part of the long shadow it throws: the scary, night-crawling beauty of Taxi Driver crossed with the corrosive, explosive political parables of Oliver Stone. It is -- in the best sense -- a deadly combination...
...nowhere. It was a remake of jean-Luc Godard's 1959 classic of the French New Wave, "Breathless (A Bout de souffle)," showing at the Brattle on Sunday. Although the original lacks the tunes of Jerry Lee Lewis, it succeeds everywhere the remake fails. The 1959 "Breathless" is film noir with a capital N, dark and deliciously scary...
...flung out as Harry scuttles frantically through his meaningless rounds, are a kind of screen, preventing us from making any real connection with Harry. In part it's because Harry's context is neither a realistic portrait of modern New York nor a persuasive movie metaphor -- as classic film noir often was -- for urban scuzziness...
Indeed, as they lurch toward a conclusion that is merely melodramatic -- and rather lamely so -- you begin to wonder why, setting aside the opportunities for superficial flash offered to De Niro, anyone bothered with this enterprise, which is, in fact, a remake of a middling 1950 noir drama. It probably would have required the dark glamour of period conventions and convictions to sustain it. Director Irwin Winkler succeeds mainly in conveying his own edginess, and screenwriter Richard Price cannot seem to get his people grounded either in reality or in a metaphorically persuasive fictional realm. The result is a nervous...