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Super 8 (2011)
It Arrives.
Filmmaker(s): J.J. Abrams

In 1979 Ohio, several youngsters are making a zombie movie with a Super-8 camera. In the midst of filming, the friends witness a horrifying train derailment and are lucky to escape with their lives. They soon discover that the catastrophe was no accident, as a series of unexplained events and disappearances soon follows. Deputy Jackson Lamb, the father of one of the kids, searches for the terrifying truth behind the crash.

Reborn Another primary layering. This time the idea is to start with a horror subgenre and grow inside it. This is virtually set in the fifties (though literally in 1979). It has the military conspiracy, the small town at risk, the alien monster, the lone...
Published February 10, 2024
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The Mystery Man (1935)
Stark Drama! A Shadow Creeping Through the Night!
Filmmaker(s): Ray McCarey

Hard-boiled newspaper reporter Larry Doyle (Robert Armstrong) goes a bit too far in celebrating a work bonus and wakes up on a train bound for St. Louis with only a buck on his person. To remedy the problem, Doyle pawns the revolver he's carrying. When the gun is subsequently used in a murder, Doyle's problems only multiply. In the meantime, he's also fallen in love with a comely stranger (Maxine Doyle) he convinced to impersonate his wife.

Prehistoric Fishing Cinematic archeology is what this is all about. The film has lost all its appeal as the hooks have gone out of style. But we can see major chunks that have evolved to what we have now. The basic setup is the fold...
Published February 9, 2024
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Rubber (2010)
Are you TIRED of the expected?
Filmmaker(s): Quentin Dupieux

A group of people gather in the California desert to watch a "film" set in the late 1990s featuring a sentient, homicidal car tire named Robert. The assembled crowd of onlookers watch as Robert becomes obsessed with a beautiful and mysterious woman and goes on a rampage through a desert town.

Erasure I have a hard time with films like this. On the one hand, it explicitly deals with concepts that attract me. It is very clever and well enough put together. But there is balance between art meant to affect you and essays about the...
Published February 9, 2024
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Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011)
The game is afoot.
Filmmaker(s): Guy Ritchie

There is a new criminal mastermind at large (Professor Moriarty) and not only is he Holmes’ intellectual equal, but his capacity for evil and lack of conscience may give him an advantage over the detective.

Intermediaries This is a new genre, I think. You go to it not so much for what it is, but what it points to, and what filters have been applied. Perhaps the genre was cemented with the Depp Pirate movies which had noise and story,...
Published February 9, 2024
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The Girl (2000)
Filmmaker(s): Sande Zeig

A torrid affair between two women, a struggling artist and a flame-haired blues singer, upsets a man who has a thing for the girl.

Room in Paris I guess I should describe what the filmmaker described as her goals. She wanted to make a noir love story and to ‘abstract‘ it, making it pure, and therefore effective. This isn’t noir as I understand it, but that does not matter...
Published February 9, 2024
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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
How do you find an enemy who is hidden right before your eyes?
Filmmaker(s): Tomas Alfredson

In the bleak days of the Cold War, espionage veteran George Smiley is forced from semi-retirement to uncover a Soviet mole within his former colleagues at the heart of MI6.

Control My notion of noir is simple: it is a form of narrative that recognizes that there is a viewer, and that the presence of the viewer reshapes the world to make an interesting story. That is, various unlikely circumstances occur; portholes to visibility by...
Published February 9, 2024
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Innocence (2004)
The end of innocence...the beginning of life.
Filmmaker(s): Lucile Hadzihalilovic

At an unusual private school for girls, new students, including young Iris, show up in coffins. The establishment's teachers, Mademoiselle Eva and Mademoiselle Edith, introduce Iris and her fellow pupils to the school's curriculum, which includes fairy-like dances through a nearby forest. When night falls, the older girls, who are on the threshold of womanhood, are then given mysterious, life-changing lessons.

Moving Into “Institute Benjamenta” folded into “Picnic at Hanging Rock” “Maladolescenza” folded into “Stalker” “Yume“ folded into “Drowning with numbers” “Au revoir les enfants” folded into “Suspiria“ “Sex and Lucia” folded into “Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary” These movements formed into a star. That...
Published February 7, 2024
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Phantom of Chinatown (1940)
A Slight Case Of Murder... Solved by Jimmy Wong!
Filmmaker(s): Phil Rosen

In the middle of a pictorial lecture on his recent expedition to the Mongolian Desert, Dr. John Benton,the famous explorer, drinks from the water bottle on his lecture table, collapses and dies. His last words "Eternal Fire" are the only clue Chinese detective Jimmy Wong and Captain Street of the police department have to work on.

Conspiratorial Filmmaking I maintain that some very important conventions were worked out in 30s mysteries. The Charlie Chan series was instrumental in some of these, and this is the last of them. It incidentally has Charlie‘s son as the detective, the first Asian playing the...
Published February 5, 2024
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The House of Fear (1939)
Filmmaker(s): Joe May

A detective goes undercover as a producer to investigate an actor's murder, which occurred during the performance of a play...

Triple Staged I watch these old mysteries not because I expect to find a good one. They rarely are, but often you can see a free art experimenting with different cinematic tricks while no one yet had a settled cinematic vocabulary. And here is a...
Published February 5, 2024
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The Case of the Stuttering Bishop (1937)
This new Perry mason mystery drama will add popularity to this series of exciting adventure stories! Crime points to many! Who is guilty?
Filmmaker(s): William Clemens

A Bishop from Australia comes to Perry to ask him to take a case of a woman wrongly accused of manslaughter 22 years before. The case would involve the wealthy Mr. Brownley and the fact that his alleged granddaughter may be an imposter. With that, the Bishop leaves and is clubbed in his hotel room. Soon after, he leaves on a boat and Perry meets the woman - Ida Gilbert. Perry goes to see Mr. Brownley, but gets nowhere. Later that night, Brownley is to meet Ida, but he is shot by a woman who drops Ida's gun. Ida is arrested for the murder of Mr. Brownley and Perry gets involved.

Daughters, Lovers We had two great evolutionary paths in the 30s. One was an amazing diversity of invention to settle some basic narrative devices that have since served us well as the basic vocabulary of cinema. The other, parallel path was the pulp detective novel,...
Published February 5, 2024
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