 | halfbloodprincess78 |
| | Recensione ''così così'' del 1993, ma è l'unica che sono riuscita a trovare. Vedendolo mi aveva ricordato un po' le atmosfere di Twin Peaks e in effetti c'è di mezzo la Propaganda Films che proprio in quegli anni aveva già prodotto proprio Twin Peaks. Ci serverebbe Betta!  THE BIG SLEEP By Amy Taubin
(Village Voice, 1993)
Fallen Angels
The packaging couldn't have been more promising Sydney Pollack (forget The Firm, think Three Days of the Condor) and Propaganda Films (Twin Peaks) team up with Showtime to present Fallen Angels, a series of six half-hour hour film noir adaptations of short stories by Jim Thompson, Cornell Woolrich, Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy directed by Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Phil Joanou, Jonathan Kaplan, and Steven Soderbergh, and starring Gary Oldman, Alan Rickman, Isabel Rossellini, Diane Lane, Gary Busey, and James Woods There were lots of other names on the press release; these just happened to catch my eye.
"Film snoir," said my friend, stifling a yawn. "Are you sure this is only a half hour long?" We were midway through the premiere episode, Dead-End for Delia (August 1, 10 p.m.). My friend is recovering from major surgery and I'd brought her a cassette of Fallen Angels, thinking she'd be cheered by the sight of Gary Oldman in a trenchcoat and Meg Tilly in black wig that not even Sean Young could get away with. "They look like they're kid dressed up in adult actors clothes," said my friend, which is accurate but weird considering that Oldman played a 500-year-old with "great conviction in Dracula (and should have gotten a Oscar for it - as well as for every thing else he's ever done except Dead-End for Delia.)
Gabrielle Anwar appears in close-up, her mouth occupying half the screen. She plays the eponymous Delia, who's already a courpse in the opening sequence, but gets reanimated in numerous flashbacks, most of them shown from Oldman's point of view. Since he has ambivalent feelings about her (she's led him to find her true self as a dance-hall hostess), the mouth might be an expressionistic touch - a sign of his distorted psyche. Nevertheless, it's Anwar's actual lips that've been made-up, if not collagenized, in this peculiar manner and her agent should have advised her against it. Scarfing down our California rolls, my friend and I discussed the fine line between fuckable and devouring mouths. Suddenly, Oldman hurls himself down three flights of fire stairs and staggers into an alley. It's a move he made to better advantage in Criminal Law, where he Sol covered in mud while rolling downhill through the bushes with a dead woman. I wondered whether the underrated Martin Campbell who directed Criminal Law, could have done something with Dead-End for Delia that the perennial USC prodigy Phil Joanou couldn't, and why Oldman, having worked with Joanou on State of Grace, would ever want to have anything to do with him again. "Let's try the next one," said my friend, more out of politeness than curiosity. I ejected the tape and went home to give it a second look in more responsible circumstances.
If Delia is the most pretentious episode of Fallen Angels then The Quiet Room (August 29) and Murder, Obliquely (September 19) are respectively the nastiest and the silliest. Directed by Steven Soderbergh, The Quiet Room stars Joe Mantegna and Bonnie Bedelia as a pair of corrupt vice cops who make a bundle shaking down nervous johns. Bedelia, who usually plays tough but wholesome, proves that she'd make a chilling Juliet if anyone wanted to bring De Sade's The Adventures of Justine and Juliette, Her Sister to the screen, while Vinessa Shaw, as Mantegna's latchkey daughter, has the requisite bruiseable beauty for the other title role. The denouement of The Quiet Room is as predictable as it is unlikely, and I'll leave you to guess it in the first 10 minutes.
In Murder, Obliquely, Alan Rickman (who sports an American accent nearly as consistent as Oldman's) is the apex of a romantic triangle involving Diane Lane as, his two-timing mistress and Laura Dern as the good girl who hopes to catch hint on the rebound even after she's found him in flagrante de corpse, as it were. Ignoring Rickman and Dern's twitching eyebrows, Lane lakes a more full-bodied approach. Stripping to her foundation garment, she makes a dramatic exit out the front door, headed, if Murder,Obliquely's faux deco art direction is any indication, straight for Melrose Avenue, where she might have fumed heads in 1937 but not in 1993.
Jonathan Kaplan directs Since I Don't Have You (September 26) with a certain brio, though he's foiled by a script that drops its Hollywood references more leadenly than The Player. Still, Gary Busey is wonderfully expansive as he private eye trying to deliver a missing blond to two masters - Howard Hughes and Mickey Cohen. As Cohen, James Woods chows the scenery the same exact way he did playing Roy Cohn on HBO. Since I Don't Have You flatters us for remembering who Johnny Stompanato was - and if you don't, it doesn't have much else to offer.
Not to be disparaged for the company it's forced to keep, I'll Be Waiting (August 15) offend assured direction by Tom Hanks and a moving performance by Bruno Kirby, who's something like Joe Pesci but with gravity and without the shtick. Kirby plays a hotel dick who sacrifices his soul and maybe his life to save a gangster's moll (the weary but droll Marg Helgenberger). Hanks clearly loves Kirby and gives him the time he needs to react on camera. Seemingly impassive, Kirby's face registers every flickering thought, every impulse of fear and desire. Filmed in the old Ambassador Hotel Where Robert Kennedy was assassinated), I'll Be Waiting is stylish but never campy. its bittersweet tone conveyed as much by its slow tracking camera moves as by the slump of Kirby's body as he contemplates his sleeping beauty.
Unavailable for review, The Frightening Frammis(September 5) stars Isabella Rosselli and Peter Gallagher, and is directed by Tom Cruise. Rossellini told a Premiere interviewer that she was "unbelievably flattered" that Cruise had "called her personally," adding, "My agent almost had a heart attack," thus demonstrating the willingness to grovel before male power that afflicts film noir good girls and bad girls alike - since both owe their very existence to the male subjectivity that rules the genre.
It's noir's exclusively male subjectivity that makes it so attractive to contemporary sensibilities. Not any old male subjectivity, mind you, but an identity that's coming apart at the seams, beset by anxieties that are both sexual and social, torn between personal desire and institutional demands. The noir male can't live within the law of the father and he can't live without it.
In the strict, film noir refers to a groups of American films made between Hiroshima and the election of JFK. Its amoral antiheroes are the men who were told they had come back from World War II as winners, but are at a loss to discover, in decaying cities or suburban tract housing, what exactly they've won. In a looser sense - and noir is as promiscuous a cultural label as postmodern - it includes just about any narrative where the goings-on are a bit criminal. the ambiance is a bit retro (even in its scifi inversion) and the p.o.v. is male and affectless in the curious way that masks paralytic anxiety. Its atmospheric venetian-blind-slatted lighting notwithstanding most of Fallen Angels fails the most minimal standards of noir, since the scripts barely sketch out characters, let alone psyches. []
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E tutte possiamo capire benissimo perchè la povera Laura Dern prende una tranvata instantanea quando glielo presentano la prima volta 
Su youtube ho trovato questo video: 
