Fantastic Short Film Friday - The Bloody Olive (live-action)

And we are back with another installment in our Fantastic Short Film Friday series, as we continue to showcase films released in the "lesser" known form of cinema- the short film.

This week we have for you a darkly humorous look at love and backstabbing, of double, triple, and quadruple crosses coming from everywhere that will leave head spinning with laughter. Here is a 10-minute Belgium film noir comedic short called, The Bloody Olive from filmmaker, Vincent Bal. What I find so amazing about this short is its ability to mix darkly film noir aesthetics, cliches and conventions and just exasperating them so much so that in the end the short becomes a comedy.

It's a Christmas celebration as a man and his wife sit down to have a lovely Christmas dinner. There's a ring of the doorbell and in walks a man who accuses the husband of embezzling from his company. Shorts are fired, knives are pulled out, as the three characters keeping getting killed over and over only to rise from the dead in twist after twist. This is the short M. Night Shyamalan would have made if he went crazy with his love of twists. Deeply and darkly funny, this short from Belgium will keep you guessing right up until the end. It's a set piece with only three actors, but there are so many twists and turns that in the end you're still left wondering, who's the real victim? The laughs here are hard won and of the slapstick variety, and those that both love film noirs and comedies will find a brilliantly executed marriage of the two genres.

Check this out if you're in the mood to have some dark laughs coupled with wonderful displays of mayhem and film noir violence. Seriously, the filmmakers somehow make this actually really funny. Enjoy this weeks dose of short form goodness in, The Bloody Olive.

What I Think Of: Brick (2005)

Come one, come all as the music plays, it's time for an homage, this time in the form of classic detective novels and movies of a by-gone-era, this week I bring you the movie Brick. This 2005 neo-noir film is both written and the directorial debut of American filmmaker, Rian Johnson. Set right out of the pages of a hard-boiled detective novel, but with the setting in modern suburbia, Brick stars Joseph Gordon Levitt as Brenden Frye, a high school student who one days finds his ex-girlfriend Emily (Lost's Emilie De Ravin), lying dead in a storm drain. He takes it upon himself to solver her murder which brings him down down the drain to the dark highschool underbelly of drug kingpins, femme fatales and classic double and triple crossing. Can Brenden solve Emily's murder and will he be happy with the truths he finds along the way?

As anyone who listens to our podcast knows, I love me some Brick, I mean really love. It has everything a fan of 40's and 50's cinema and film-noir could ever want, it's influences just bleed off the celluloid film stock. Here are some of my thoughts concerning the film:

• The plot, the characters, the dialogue all draw heavy inspiration from the greatest of detective novels and movies, especially those written by Dashiell Hammett. The characters in Brick feel like they’ve stepped right off the set of The Maltese Falcon, or The Thin Man series, or the pages of Red Harvest. And they’re high school students. Just brilliant. It's all wonderfully complex, a maze of dialogue and transparencies, a film that just gets better with each repeat viewing.
• This is the first film where I stood up and took notice of Joseph Gordon Levitt and his acting prowess. He plays the beaten down detective role so well, the guy who lives in gray, who only sees the finish line and doesn't care how he gets there. He embodies the classic single determination of Sam Spade, the detective with a mouth that cashes more checks than it can afford!! Seriously beautiful stuff and JGL has never looked back, getting better with each film he's in.
• The way the film is shot, the way the film looks is just sublime goodness. The way the colors look washed out, as if black and white are trying to push back the rainbow. It's dark hues, it's wonderful use of undefined blue, Brick is the perfect example on how to use color in a film-noir, a lot like in 1994's The Last Seduction which was also punishingly beautiful to watch.
• I will say that the dialogue can be a bit off putting for those unfamiliar with crime films and how the characters speak- the slang almost appearing as if in a foreign language. However, the script does try to explain the most important of the slang words, while the others the viewer can fill in for themselves. However, if you're watching this on dvd, I recommend turning on the subtitles if you have a hard time following what the character's say. You'll thank me for that when it's over.
• I love the fact that while everyone is tough and murder is the game, all the characters are still high school students who live at home. And while on the street everything breathes noir, at home all the characters lead a normal high school student/family life. It all just brings a wonderful added layering to the film.
• As I mentioned before, this is director Rian Johnson's first film and what a film it is. His second film, The Brothers Bloom is just as good while many even find it better. Johnson just has an amazing ear for characters and since he writes all the scripts he directs he has full control, his vision is at the forefront of all his films and the world should be thankful for that. He gets what films are about and his films make every viewer understand that while Johnson is a director, he is also a lover of films. He has seen as much as you have, maybe even more, and he'd like to show you his spin, his take on film genre's, here with film noir's and with Bloom, silent films.
  

The females here are all fatales, the muscle all stupid, the drugs all cooked, and the innocents are long gone. This is a world where no character is right, no character is pure, a world of lost souls, fast talkers, and cuts and bruises. A classic world, my favorite world, it's all crime and noir here, so just sit back, enjoy your stay and try to jump when the shadows move.

Movie Review: Give 'Em Hell Malone

I absolutely love the poster for this film, which is sadly the most entertaining aspect of the film. Give 'em Hell Malone is a direct-to-dvd crime noir where Thomas Jane plays a tough as nails PI (are there any other kind) who must dodge bullets and help save a damsel in distress (Elsa Pataky) who may be more trouble than she's worth.

Directed by Russell Mulcahy, who after directing 1986's Highlander, ruining 1991's Highlander sequel, Highlander 2: The Quickening and nearly ending the Resident Evil film franchise with 2007's Resident Evil: Extinction, now appears to be in the direct-to-dvd directing wasteland after coming out with this film and 2008's Scorpion King 2: Rise of a Warrior. Poor, poor Russell Mulcahy, we hardly knew ye, but perhaps it's for the best.

I love crime noirs, which are probably my favorite types of films, along with early 20th century screwball comedies. So when I heard about this kind of comicbook homage to the old crime films with Thomas Jane in the lead role, I eagerly rushed out to see it. Sadly this is more parody/spoof than homage. It's not an overt spoof since it doesn't try to make fun of the genre conventions its mimicking, but it's cheesy dialogue, cardboard cutout characters, and lack of any real budget make it feel more a spoof than an homage. It's like the filmmakers took all the great stuff that make hardboiled crime noir's awesome (the beautiful femme fatale, the gun action and violence, the "hero" that walks in a gray world, rather than black and white) and strips them of all the fun, leaving the bare bones scraps behind that kinda have enough meat on it to make some soup (it tries even to enter the world of camp with a burn-victim henchman who keeps getting set on fire and a Japanese school girl who loves cutting things without theKill Bill cool).

Give 'em Hell Malone had some potential. Beautiful cast, a lot of great gore and violence, and a bluish-tinted cgi world reminiscent of Frank Miller's Sin City, but the screenwriters made a cardinal sin when writing the film, they made the characters boring and empty, and when playing around in a genre that's all about the characters since it's all about the hidden truths of humanity, then yeah, you got a very uninteresting movie. The screenwriters failed to realize that what makes a good crime noir is not the action, not the violence or even the world, but rather the people who inhabit the shadows.

It hurts me to say this since we genre lovers don't get enough crime noir films anymore, but don't bother renting Give 'em Hell Malone or even watching it for free on late night tv. There was potential here, potential for a film franchise even, but this is one world that's not worth visiting.

What I Think Of: The Big Sleep (1946)

Bogey and Bacall, Bogey and Bacall- just their mere presence can transform a good film into a great film. This was the second of four films the on/off-screen pair starred in together. There are two different versions of this film, the 1946 theatrical release and the 1945 pre-release. While the 1945 pre-release makes the film a more straight forward detective story, the theatrical release, while being confusing as all hell, has nearly 18 more minutes of Bogey and Bacall. The problem for most people is that the theatrical release changes a simple whodunit story, into a non-linear, "what the hell is going on story"- but you know what? I'd prefer more scenes of Bogey and Bacall together than any sensible and more coherant story. So yeah, this is a true film noir classic and is one of the few instances where things sizzle on the screen. Bacall looks enchanting as always and Bogey, well he's every guys hero- the gumshoe who answers to no one but himself, who stays one step ahead of the villians and who always gets the girl, no matter how femme fatale she is, and no matter how many they may be. I love this film so much, the picture to the left is my desktop background on my laptop. Bogey and Bacall!