Word: noire
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...Film noir is more than a lighting style. It's a seedy, cynical world view: people are motivated by greed, stupidity and sexual avarice. Director John Dahl gets it all right in his mean, hilarious tale of a drifter (Nicolas Cage) mistaken for a contract killer. The title town is off all the moral maps, and so -- deliriously, invigoratingly -- is this lowbrow, low-budget assault...
...Triangle Theater Company gives The Well of Horniness, Holly Hughes hilarious satire of female and male sexuality and gender roles, the brilliant production it deserves. The noir-ish subject of the play is highlighted by zoot suit costumes, smoky ambiance and tricky lighting. Hughes' jokes are delivered with alacrity and the actors keep up with the fast-paced...
...part of the new prissiness. But evil has traditionally been an equal-opportunity employer. Where would Barbara Stanwyck and the other ladies of the noir have been if their only subtext had been female victimization? Every once in a while a girl has to stop brooding over gender injustice, start thinking about sexual revenge, and slip into her thigh-highs and stiletto heels to lure a few dopes to destruction...
Similarly, director John Dahl is after something more than a nostalgic evocation of the old film noir style. He can light a mean street, a smoky barroom or a morning-after bedroom in the best tradition of the genre. But these venues are no longer situated in a big city. Dahl's Red Rock West, released earlier this year, was set in a dour little Western town. Seduction mostly takes place in a small, upstate New York town. What Dahl is saying is that you can perhaps avoid becoming a crime statistic by living in the boondocks, but that evil...
...slogan, WINCHELL HE SEES ALL HE KNOWS ALL. With its rightful emphasis on the power-mad side of Winchell's persona, Gabler's biography validates Burt Lancaster's chilling portrayal of gossipmonger J.J. Hunsecker in the 1957 film The Sweet Smell of Success. (In real life, Winchell, in cinema noir fashion, had his daughter Walda carted off to an asylum in a straitjacket in paternal rage against an unsuitable marriage.). The same haunting sense of hubris at the Stork Club animates Michael Herr's artful 1990 rendition of the columnist's life, Walter Winchell: A Novel...