Word: noire
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...PROBABLY impossible to recreate film noir since it is essentially a process of style. The luscious black and whites, the jutting angles, the rainy nights--they're all television staple now and can no longer bear the burden, as they once did, of being some outward reflection of the nation's inner soul...
...managed to hide itself behind its silver screens, and the news from the Coast was usually good. People were dancing out there. And singing. And repenting. During the war, though, a whole new style of movie started skulking out of the Coast. The French labelled it film noir, but coining the phrase was about as close as Gallic sensibilities could ever get to it. No Frenchman could truly understand a city like L.A., and that, metaphorically at least, was what film noir was all about. The term was used to describe a slew of films, the likes of Double Indemnity...
...Postman Always Rings Twice (no one knows what the title alludes to), like the scripts to practically all the noir classics, is a treatise on lust and betrayal. Frank Chambers (Jack Nicholson), is a small-time drifter with a record of petty crimes, who is being drawn into L.A.'s vortex out of sheer statis. As James Cain conceived him in the 1934 novel. Chambers is a sardonic son of a bitch with no past to speak of, and no future worth mentioning. On his way to the city, Chambers drops off at a roadside diner to scam a meal...
...hovers over the details in his sets until the smallest of them seem laden with meaning. He approaches each seene as if they were miniatures in and of themselves, and they are often brilliant. The colors are all diffused to give the stylistic impression of the earlier noir films. But he seems to construct his films like a mosaic, and it results in a completely discordant sense of pace...
Even worse, the passions which drove noir seem almost charming today. When Roman Polanski made the mock-noir Chinatown, he had to slice open Nicholson's nostril to get the same effect that was once accomplished by showing a couple of thugs lurking outside the window. Leave it to the Reader's Digest to mourn our passing national innocence--but the real problem is we've lost our faith in passion. Murder and passion seem almost antithetical at the present, and adultery--well, adultery is for adolescents...