Tag: Brian De Palma

Carla Gugino is No. 1! Also No. 2!

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Disney’s Race to Witch Mountain was the highest grossing film of the weekend. It starred Carla Gugino, among others. The second highest grossing film of the weekend was Zach Snyder’s Watchmen, also starring Gugino. And it couldn’t happen to a nicer gal. (At least, she seems that way on camera.) I first noticed Gugino in [...]

Gone in 60 Seconds

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Is it just me, or are movies given less time than ever to prove themselves at the box office? I live in Los Angeles – supposedly the movie capitol of the nation – but even here, a movie that doesn’t bring in average-or-better box office returns on its initial release will quickly disappear from local [...]

Laura – And Mystery Women Generally

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Eugenia from Los Angeles writes: I just watched Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944) and didn’t find it to be all that noir! The heroine was too clean-cut, and the movie was more of a regular murder mystery to me than a noir, by my understanding of that term. I think of noirs as dealing with the [...]

A BRIEF HISTORY OF NOIR

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The ‘30s M (Lang) Two Seconds (LeRoy) Scarface (Hawks) Fury (Lang) You Only Live Once (Lang) Sabotage (Hitchcock) The ‘40s Stranger on the Third Floor (Ingster) The Seventh Victim (Lewton/Robson) Shadow of a Doubt (Hitchcock) Laura (Preminger) Phantom Lady (Siodmak) Fallen Angel (Preminger) The Woman in the Window (Lang) The Killers (Siodmak) Scarlet Street (Lang) [...]

BLUE FLOWERS AND BLACK

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A while back, I talked about the re-emergence of Romantic “blue flower” imagery in films like Batman Begins and A Scanner Darkly. Add one more film to the list – David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Early in Fire Walk With Me, an FBI chief (Lynch) presents two FBI agents (Chris Isaak and [...]