Word: noires
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...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...
...Giant). Give it Album Title of the Year; give it Song Title of the Year (Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead). Give it, while you're at it, credit for being unapologetically harsh, nasty, ironic and really rather terrific. Zevon's as tough as a film-noir hero; when he turns tender, it's only so you can better hear the sound of doom coming up like thunder...
DEAD AGAIN. Kenneth Branagh, Shakespearean phenom of the London stage, hatched an improbable hit from this no-star film noir. Branagh has fun ransacking Hitchcock's skeleton closet, and his wife Emma Thompson is ravishing as the doomed heroine, but there's not much here to prop up a preposterous plot...
...Coens' earlier films, like those of many young filmmakers, worked out of, and off of, the American genre tradition. Blood Simple was a film noir, Raising Arizona a screwball comedy of sorts and Miller's Crossing, which was probably 1990's best movie, a reanimation of the classic gangster dramas of the 1930s. But these movies were not send-ups, rip-offs or slavish homages. Each was, instead, a dark, devious and witty reinvention of whatever inspired it. Barton Fink is, in this context, a logical next step. Evoking no particular genre, it is nothing less than a shrewdly perverse...
...crowning moment at last week's Moscow meeting was the ceremonial toast between George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev. The chosen potable: Summit Cuvee, a California sparkling wine made especially for the occasion. The bubbly blend of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir was made by the Iron Horse Vineyards in Sonoma County, Calif., just west of -- you guessed it -- the Russian River. Gary Walters, chief usher at the White House, serving as First Wine Taster, made the selection. "The Soviets enjoy a little more sugar in their sparkling wines," says Walters. So the White House asked the winery to sweeten three cases...