Elevenses (Liebster Award)

Today, it's time to respond to an award from a fellow blogger! Dan Heaton from Public Transportation Snob has generously passed along the Liebster Award, which asks each recipient to respond to a series of questions. You all know Dan as that massively entertaining guy whose posts are almost always themed and attacks a subject en masse. His current marathon theme is International Gangsters and started with a bang thanks to a great review of French flick A Prophet. I've since received the award twice more, the incredibly beautiful blog Love & Squalor and everyone's favourite film maker blog And So It Begins were also kind enough to pass on the love.

I'm giving it a go, but by this point there can't be many blogs left to pass it on to. If any of you fine readers feel like answering any one of the 11 questions I pose at the end feel free to leave it in the comments, I'm sure it'll be fascinating.

Here are the rules for the Liebster Award:

1. Each person must post 11 things about themselves.
2. Answer the 11 questions the person giving the award has set for you.
3. Create 11 questions for the people you will be giving the award to.
4. Choose 11 people to award and send them a link to your post.
5. Go to their page and tell them.
6. NO TAG BACKS


Eleven Random Things About blahblahblahToby

1. Currently enjoys his lack of employment way too much for it to be healthy and can be found most days laying on the sofa reading.

2. Wishes he was still a 21 year old hipster and dresses like it.

3. If he were to have a fight with any character from The Dark Knight Rises it'd be Bruce Wayne becaue he has a gimpy leg.

4. Has an addictive personality and is currently working on filling his apartment with books so that one day they might topple over and crush him - death by book porn?

5. Is endlessly procrastinating, never finishes anything and allows each new creative idea to push the current one aside.

6. Once dreamed of being a lawyer because he'd read too much John Grisham at a young age but Theodore Boone got there first. There's a reason Disney hasn't made a movie about lawyers you know.

7. Has noticed that any picture relating to Harry Potter or Disney gets more page views than anything else he's posted and is not ashamed of using that fact to boost his blogs stats.

8. Would have answered Maura Tierney to any question relating to picking an actress for anything until relatively recently and is sad that her career never really got going on the big screen before getting stuck on ER.

9. Loves the writing of Megan Abbott and the depressing yet true, shocking story of Barbara Payton, Franchot Tone and Tom Neal that features in the background of her novel The Song Is You.

10. Still considers becoming a professional football manager because a) he loves the sport and b) he's excellent at the Sports Interactive game Football Manager.

11. Enjoys comparing movie love affairs to his own life because his own life always seems perfect in comparison.


Eleven Questions From Dan 
 
1. What's the best movie of 2012 so far?

 

OK, so according to letterboxd I've seen eighteen movies released in 2012. The one I enjoyed the most has got to be Chronicle. I expected so little from the (relatively) small budgeted sci-fi thriller but director Josh Trank provided so much. It was a real pleasure to watch a good idea turned in to a highly enjoyable movie thanks to the talent of a new director, especially when it would have been so easy to make it generic and derivitive and a horrible mishmash of pop culture.

2. What's the worst movie of 2012 so far?

The Dark Knight Rises. Simply for how disappointed I was. It's not anywhere near as bad as John Carter in reality but then DKR provided my worst experience of a movie.

3.What is your favorite band or artist?

The Decemberists win this one hands down at the moment and for the past few years. Just taking a look at my all time plays on last.fm will tell you that I've played The Decemberists 8 times more than anyone else. Colin Meloy has a wonderful voice and he's a fantastic storyteller. He even writes kids books.

4. What's your opinion on singing karaoke?
Never. No way. You can't make me.
One of my most horrifying formative experiences is as a ten year old being left on stage by my sister to sing a song I'd never heard of n front of hundreds of people. Even now I wince at the thought of it and my heart is racing from the terror.

5. Spike Lee: Overrated or underrated?

When he's on form there's nobody better than Lee but he's his own worst enemy with some of the terrible films he's made, but then so is Woody Allen and he married his own daughter. At least Spike Lee's only apparent crime in the eyes of Hollywood is that he's black.

6. Although he won't admit it, does Tommy Wiseau realize that The Room is terrible?
Oh. I certainly hope so. Can you imagine the state of that guys mind if he didn't? But admitting so would cook the golden goose and he'd never be able to attend screenings as a superstar.

7. Beyond movies, what is your area of expertise for a trivia team?

Arsenal Football Club. Somehow this is what my brain is wasted on and why I identify so readily with Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch.

8. What's your favorite brand of cereal?

No cereal required when you live in the land of Vegemite on toast.
If we're ever out for breakfast and I don't feel like eggs I will however have the bircher muesli.

9. Is The Tree of Life a brilliant movie, a self-indulgent mess, or somewhere in between?
I haven't seen it yet, it's long. I am lengthist.

10. Are you excited about the Olympics? If so, which competitions?
I haven't cared about the Olympics since 1992, I don't even care about the fact that Great Britain has a football team entered this time around. It's not real football.

11. What's the last movie that you watched?
Bill Cunningham, New York

Who's Next? - Eleven Blogs That Deserve Your Attention
These 11 bloggers are all doing amazing work and deserve your attention. For that reason, they get the dubious pleasure of answering some essential questions. The "winners" are:
Cinemanarcs
Cinematic Spectacle
Can You Dig It?(feminisingfilm)
Defiant Success
Brian vs. Movies
Blondoner
What Indie Nights?
The Great Movie Project
Dangerous Dans Bookblog
OCD Viewer
Split Reel(This is me cheating because she's taken a break)



What I Really Really Want To Know Is: (Eleven Questions Paid Forward)
1. If the events of Purple Rose of Cairo could really happen, which movie character would you want to walk off of the screen in to your miserable little life?
2. If you were marooned on another planet with a limited space hard drive on your solar powered Macbook Pro (I'm sure Steve Jobs had them working on this before he died) what three movies would you like to have in your videos folder?
3. Is reading 50 Shades of Grey on public transport a badge of pride, a cry for help, a statement of sexual dissatisfaction or a label that screams "easily led by media fads"?
4. If you had to live in the world of crime fiction would you prefer to be in an Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler or Steig Larsson book?
5. You're stranded for 227 days in a boat with one animal, do you think a Bengal Tiger would eat you?
6. What superhero franchise would you give a dark and depressing Batman style reboot to on the big screen?
7. Gotham Central is a series of comic books about the lives of the gotham City Police Department and Death Comes To Pemberley is a detective novel set in the world of Pride & Prejudice, what fictional world would you like to see turned in to crime fiction and what type would it be?
8. Mint, Sage, Rosemary and Cinnamon, what flavour would you choose for your old fashioned tooth powder recipe?
9. You're tasked with programming an independant film festival, what genre do you focus on? Documentary, Horror, Anime, Martial Arts or World Cinema?
10. Witches, burn them at the stake or dunk them in the lake?
11. Which city in Europe would you most like to visit during the 2012 London Olympics?

Noir-a-Thon: Phantom Lady (1944)

This weeks entry for our Noir-a-Thon is Phantom Lady. The first movie adapted from a novel by Cornell Woolrich (using the pseudonym William Irish) and the first major American movie directed by another European emigre, Robert Siodmak, this is the kind of adaptation you would have expected from a more experienced pairing.


Director: Robert Siodmak
Starring: Franchot Tone, Ella Raines, Elisha Cook Jr., Alan Curtis
Year:1944
Country of origin: USA
Language: English

Synopsis: An innocent man is accused of murder but his anonymous alibi cannot be found, sending him to death row. His trusty secretary must discover the truth and save his bacon.


What Indie Nights? review

Hello BBBG readers. This is your captain speaking. Your random fact for this week is that Sarawak, a Malaysian state in Borneo, was ruled for over 100 years by a British family, who were given the Rajah-ship as a thankyou gift by a Sultan and known as the White Rajahs. Honestly, I couldn't make this stuff up.

This week we were treated to the finest noir we've seen in a long time. Even my mum liked it. She was shouting at the screen, telling characters Don't go in there! and Look out! It takes a lot for my mum to stay awake throughout a whole movie, friends, so I wouldn't take this praise lightly.



This film was excellent. I don't even think it was the contrast with the limp and confusing Ministry of Fear from last week, or the subtle and somewhat romantic Laura from the week before. It was genuinely tense, suspenseful and absolutely gorgeous - the cinematography was spellbinding!

Our hero this week is an architect known as Scott Henderson, whose hair is so full of pomade you could see your reflection in it, should you feel so inclined. Seriously, even being in prison has no effect on the shininess of his hair. Dude was dedicated. His wife is strangled while he's out one night, and his only alibi is a woman whom he met in a bar, who insisted on 'no names' and who can't be found for love nor money by the police, Mr Henderson, or his spunky secretary Kansas (not her real name, but it's what he calls her and I can't remember the actual character's name. What do you think I am, superman?)



It is this mystery woman who drives the plot - it is her absence that causes Mr Henderson's alibi to be doubted, her presence as we saw it that convinces us of his innocence. When witnesses whom we know saw them together start telling the police he was alone that night, we start to suspect her - why is she having them paid off to stay silent, we wonder? What kind of a monstrous lady-criminal would sit by and watch an innocent man go down for the murder of his wife when a word from her would save him? This is certainly the most ingenious use of the femme fatale motif we've seen so far: the femme in question is absent the entire way through, allowing us all the time in the world to attribute shady and terrible motives to her actions.

The truth is rather different, of course, and I won't lie, even I saw it coming a mile off, and I'm not known, shall we say, for astuteness when it comes to signposts in filmmaking. The murderer and the motive are as clear as day - in fact we know who it is for the final third of the film - and yet this does nothing at all to detract from the suspense and tightly-wound nature of the plot. Knowing who it is just gives us more chances to say 'Don't go in there!!' to the innocent characters (thanks Mum).



While the film was visually stunning, I'd like to dedicate my final paragraph to Kansas the secretary. She's resourceful, dedicated and chipper, never giving up on her quest to exonerate her boss. I've noticed lately that there seem to be as many of these positive female characters in our noirs as there are the femmes fatale. I'd go so far as to say they were, thus far, as big a part of the noir canon as the fatales, quite often playing opposite them in the 'dowdy' or 'clever' girl roles, never getting to sparkle, but quite often getting to stay alive. I don't know about you, but I'd rather be dowdy and alive than glamorous and dead. Unless I got to be Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express, in which case I'd happily die any awful femme fatale death you dreamt up for me. They tend to get shot in the stomach from extremely close range, I find.
I almost think this anti-fatale character deserves its own name - femme vitale? If there are any French-speakers out there who could give me a legitimate opposite to fatale, I'm open to ideas. Cherchez la femme, so to speak...



Blahblahblahtoby review

If last weeks movie was as convoluted in its plot as the noir mode of film making gets then Phantom Lady is, so far at least, the height of the noir style.

Siodmak and his director of photography, Elwood Bredell, led the way in expressionist lighting and powerful use of shadows, laying down a template for future directors who dreamed of making it big in the film noir cycle. To date in the noir-a-thon we have seen some incredibly powerful visuals, even in last weeks Ministry of Fear we saw Fritz Lang and his darkened room/brightly lit hallway, but they were sporadic at best. Phantom Lady is almost a non-stop barrage of breath taking images. I was constantly making mental notes of which shots should be screen captured and in the end gave up trying to remember because there were so many.



The story of a wrongly accused man could be called Kafkaesque, the nightmare scenario of entrapment, wrongful imprisonment and knowing that nobody believes your story is one that we've all seen rehashed many times over the years but that does not detract from the power of rooting for the entrapped, even if he is a rich architect living in a similar milieu to Laura and not the grimy, poverty stricken streets that are usually associated with noir.

This is middle class crime once more and our male protagonist is just another man, passively accepting his fate like one of those once proud jungle cats seen in third rate zoos. In comparison the performance of Ella Raines as the secretary of the accused architect is superb. She is everything a man might expect to be in a Hollywood movie; strong, determined, resourceful etc and puts her cowering paramour to shame as he awaits execution.



Franchot Tone as the bad guy is merely OK, I know they had a different way of telling and showing in movies back in the 40's but I really don't think the way they accentuated the "my hands are itching to kill" aspect of his character stands the test of time. In a polished, highly professional piece of modern cinema this throwback to the silent expressionism of something like Fritz Lang's M just feels out of place.

The stand out scene is the slightly surreal jazz club sequence in which Ella Raines, dressed to look as trashy as possible is on a date with Elisha Cook Jr. in an attempt to find out some information from him. They go to a jazz club where Cook plays drums. The entire sequence stands out for its tight framing, dutch angles, expressionist lighting and Elisha Cook Jr.'s frenetic banging on his drums; his face echoing the main character from the Dali/Bunuel piece Un Chien Andalou as he approaches climax, all alluding to sexual behaviour that was unable to be shown in a more straight forward way. It certainly beats a train going through a tunnel.

Of all the lesser known films so far on this journey through noir this is the one I would insist on you watching, it's superb. The more time that passes since I screened it the better it gets in my mind. The visuals alone are worth drooling over time and time again, even the shots without Ms Raines.

Feel free to discuss these incredible images or our fabulous words in the blahs below

And now for some coming attractions