Word: ripley
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...last three to four years, noir has become culturally rehabilitated. The recent success of L.A. Confidential is one example: the re-release of Purple Noon (based on Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, with hunky French actor Alain Delon) is another. In the world of books, James Ellroy's novels are selling well. Ross MacDonald's works have been reissued in a Vintage edition, and the Harvard Bookstore featured a compilation of crime novels of the '40s and '50s only a month or two ago. I am compelled to ask: why now? Why are people suddenly interested in noir...
...15th year of her affliction, her 90th of living, she has become an exhibit in Ripley's Believe It or Not! Come see the former junior high school English teacher, wit, storyteller and singer to children transformed before your very eyes into a sphinx. Yet she is still a great beauty, ladies and gentlemen. The silver hair, the smooth pink skin. Go ahead and touch her. She won't bite. (Then again, she might...
...most popular films, Grier played a strong woman out for revenge. "This is the end of your rotten life, you motherf___ing dope pusher," she cries in Coffy before blowing a dealer's head off. Grier was a woman of action well before Thelma met Louise, or Ripley encountered aliens. In 1975 Ms. magazine put her on its cover. She was also a sex symbol at a time when black actors rarely had love scenes. Says Darius James, author of the book That's Blaxploitation!: "Pam Grier was one of the first important female action heroes. She was able...
Miscellaneous Hooey: Inherited memories, whiskey sours in cube form, Dan Hedaya as your neighborhood movie teamster, Videodroming Ripley's chest...
...director, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, hurries us past all the desperate explanations required by sequels to movies that ended up pretty definitively (the last we saw of Ripley in Alien 3, she was taking a dunk in molten metal). Since most of these are incomprehensible anyway, especially as they are constantly interrupted by fires, floods and explosions, Jeunet is eager to get on with the really scary stuff. This is not, given the movie's self-satirizing impulse, as terrifying as it once was. But on the whole, the eek-for-yuks trade-off is more than fair--hip without being...