Word: noire
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...BOTTOM LINE: A remake of a 1950 film noir provides Robert De Niro with a star turn around a muddy track...
...album with his Quartet West, shows Haden, now 55, at his lyrical peak. It is a kind of musical-dream autobiography, part funky and part rhapsodic, that evokes the style of his early Los Angeles days as well as the mythic mood of vintage L.A., the film- noir city. Chinatown. Chandlertown...
...only for its accomplishment but also for what it represents. Before X, the number of great authentic African-American operas stood at precisely one: Scott Joplin's underrated Treemonisha, which foreshadowed X's themes of black self-reliance and self- determination by 70 years. In between came the faux noir of Porgy and Bess, which is really a Russian grand opera in blackface (the choral scenes are closer to Rimsky-Korsakov or Mussorgsky than they are to anything Catfish Row ever heard). With a fierce, angry and brilliant libretto by Thulani Davis, the composer's cousin, X is at once...
Like The Nasty Girl from Germany, Toto le Heros from Belgium and Delicatessen from France, Zentropa finds movie energy in spiritual malaise. These films take their cue from the dystopic visions of Blade Runner and Brazil -- pictures set in the future but cluttered with decor from the film noir past. The imagery possesses a kind of dour voluptuousness: bleak and busy. Their crammed, skewed compositions excite the eye. These movies won't push Lethal 3 off the multiplex screen; they can't compete with Hollywood product. And that is the happy point. They are appealingly strange -- different from the American...
...visual gray tones here. Dark cloaked figures rush toward the Grand Canal, and pigeons scatter up into an angry sky. The spider-webbery of shadows casts doom across an innocent face. It is a canvas, of baroque silhouettes and diagonals rampant, that marries text to texture in vintage film-noir style. Othello: the postwar man who feels betrayed by his wife. Desdemona: the innocent woman brutalized by her suspicious spouse...