Word: noirish
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...director's strongest, strangest work since the Twin Peaks days begins as the tale of a starstruck blond (Naomi Watts) who hooks up with a brunet mystery woman (Laura Elena Harring). For its first 90 minutes the film motors along this noirish route--Raymond Chandler shops at Frederick's of Hollywood--then goes defiantly, wondrously weird. This handsome, persuasively inhabited spook show reveals Lynch's talent for fooling, unsettling and finally enthralling his audience. Viewers will feel as though they've just finished a great meal but aren't sure what they've been served. Behind them, the chef smiles...
...results were impressive: gnarled, noirish items like The Odd One Dies and Where a Good Man Goes. Milkyway developed a solid rep, and its house star, the sensitively sullen Lau Ching-wan, became the poor man's Chow Yun-fat. A Hero Never Dies, a blueprint for Fulltime Killer in its rivalry of two gang lieutenants, won a fistful of critics' prizes. Running Out of Time garnered Andy Lau his first Best Actor citation in the Hong Kong Film Awards. With The Mission, To was elevated to top status among Asian action auteurs. One of his first Milkyway films...
...censors; the film had to be smuggled out of China, and was completed with a grant from the Rotterdam Film Festival. In 1996, Wang Xiaoshuai made Frozen under the pseudonym Wu Ming (literally No Name), for fear of government retribution; another of his films, So Close to Paradise, a noirish study of gangsters in Shanghai, was reshot, recut and withheld for five years. Jia Zhangke shot Xiao Wu (Pickpocket, 1997) despite the censors' rejection of his script; he was banned from directing, but went ahead anyway. Jia got funds for his next film, Platform (2000), in part from Japanese star...
...there anything in Hollywood more frightening than the possibility of more Flintstones sequels? E! hopes so, having chosen a sort of Tinseltown Twilight Zone for its first fictional series. Coming from the home of snide, shoestring productions like Talk Soup, this noirish anthology is surprisingly slick in look and earnest in tone. It sometimes earns a good satiric laugh, but mostly it's dead serious, more so than the corny dialogue ("A lot of dirty little things get whispered in the night") and predictable plots deserve. As for making show biz scary, isn't that why we have...
...page work of near genius, probably won't get the attention that it deserves. Although it spans a comparatively short six months in 1984, beginning with a Japanese thirty-something making a spaghetti breakfast to the beat of Rossini's "The Thieving Magpie," The Windup Bird Chronicle is a noirish, tragi-comic epic worthy of its own praise dictionary. From a bizarre story of the thirty-something's marital and spiritual crisis, Murakami's novel kaleidoscopes out into an exploration of post-WWII Japan that moves from the horrors of war to Allen Ginsberg to the loss of a beloved...