Word: noire
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...BOTTOM LINE: A Mexican setting for some sleazy, stinging film noir...
...FILM NOIR, THAT '40S HOLLYWOOD style of bitter men, treacherous women and slicing shadows, is making spectral appearances on cable TV this summer. But noir is easier to evoke than it is to revive. Fallen Angels, Showtime's series of short films, errs in thinking the genre is all venetian blinds and overhead fans. For a sharper rear view, check out The Wrong Man. Director Jim McBride (The Big Easy) and writers Roy Carlson and Michael Thoma have the inside word on noir. It isn't a look but a vision -- a bleak take on life and its evil twin...
This is seriously rancid noir, with an archetypal plot: a loser on the run, hooking up with strangers who are very good at being bad. In Mexico, Alex (Kevin Anderson), a fugitive sailor, falls in with Missy (Rosanna Arquette) and Mills (John Lithgow), a married couple linked like felons on a chain gang. There is a slim mystery, with the federales in pursuit, but this is at heart a study of the cages three people have made of their lives. Mills says what they all feel: "I just can't get out of this goddam life...
Lloyd Webber's goal in recent years has been to bridge the gap between the musical and the opera, reclaiming the latter as a popular rather than elite form. An operatic reading does no disservice to Billy Wilder's film noir, which has been preserved more than adapted. The climax, when the fallen star Norma Desmond shoots her lover and he tumbles into a swimming pool, has opera's larger-than-life emotion. So does the denouement, as she lapses into madness and announces, to a Cecil B. DeMille visible only to her, that she is ready for her close...
...still dancing at 60, Kiss is her first Broadway show since Jerry's Girls in 1986. During that run, she broke her leg in a car accident and was told she might never again walk, let alone skitter, strut and tango eight times a week as a combination film- noir diva and emblem of death...