Word: scenting
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...your hardboiled fiction shelf. Both are set in the prime film-noir territory of sunny, sepulchral California: Los Angeles, home of Philip Marlowe (among other truth seekers) and moviemakers (among other chronic liars) for Mulholland Dr.; Santa Rosa (scene of Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt) for the toxic scent of small-town failure in The Man Who Wasn't There. Both films serve up a lovely, lurid brew of greed, murder and twisted identities. But the Coen movie, with Billy Bob Thornton and Frances McDormand locked in a jealous adagio, is twistily faithful to the noir formula. The Lynch...
...true scent of romantic obsession, one would have to go east: to the Chinese Peony Pavilion, Hong Kong director Yonfan's love story of two women (played by Japan's Rie Miyazawa and Taiwan's Joey Wong) in a Suzhou noble house. The film is so saturated in the sad glamour of their love that style becomes substance. The women don't make their sexual affinity explicit; but one can always feel the breath of the other's erotic interest, and the air goes humid with promise. Seeing Peony Pavilion is like getting high on the opium smoke a beautiful...
...Cannes did have one film with the true scent of romantic obsession: Yonfan's Peony Pavilion. Again we meet two women who forge a deep friendship, and a man who tests that bond. This film, though, is so saturated in the sad glamour of their love that style becomes substance. The moving camera, the gorgeous homes and gardens of Suzhou, the handsome people with complex urges?they all seem to swoon in the telling of a story about Jade (radiant Japanese star Rie Miyazawa), a Kunqu Opera singer who marries into a noble house and falls into a near-lesbian...
...This first part, which Heuet calls "Combray," begins with the narrator being swept back to boyhood by the scent of a cookie. From there it reads episodically, dreamily recounting summertime events during a now-lost Edwardian age that includes bed-ridden aunts, earthy servants, looking at magic lantern shows, and fussing over the intricacies of propriety and social rank. Most crudely, it's about how the boy learns to appreciate beauty, and the way art can capture...
...Leather Report "Man's Inhumanity to Man From sandal to saddle to bucket seat, the musky scent of leather has been the olfactory accompaniment to mankind's inexorable march of progress. Indeed, our willingness to crawl into another animal's skin is precisely one of the traits that separates us from those same beasts. Yet forced by the heat and humidity to shed our cowhides and lambskin loincloths during hotter weather, it's no wonder we are stripped of a little humanity and civilization every Memorial Day. The summertime German invasion of Poland, the Watergate break-in and Woodstock...