Sketchbook
The Clouded Yellow
The Clouded Yellow gave me a pleasant viewing but turned out to be quite a disappointment after all. It seems that the main character took the role of a rather worn out agent from the start and always looked absolutely lifeless. He is an english cold type and because of this lack of emotions his romantic affair with Simmons becomes ridiculous and unlikely as her usual Bambi looks meet the wall.
Sometimes I had a feeling that he engaged with this little lost girl only out of a boredom, to produce himself a little entertainment and to meet some chinamen and old contacts around the block. Moreover, the rhythm of the movie is strangely abrupt and doesn't help to build much tension until some final acceleration.
One could see the potential of the cast if only it was another combination, something more fascinating, like a chess match between the minds of two agents, Howard and More, playing hide-and-seek. But More gets nothing more than two minutes of a screen time. Alas.
The film has some highlights of course, not much original though, like a Hitchcockian trademark final scene. It could had some more thrills, especially in the scenes with a maniac uncle if he had a bigger part from the beginning. But the movie is not about uncle's obsessions and his deranged mind, it's about something else. Not quite sure about what...
Kiss me Deadly
Because of the wide acknowledgement and sort of a cult status of this movie among cinema-goers I was certainly hoping for something more, expected the movie to be on the same string with the hallmark of film-noirs, something as big as Double Indemnity, for instance. And the result almost met my expectations, although I had to make some alteration in my point of view to enjoy it. Perhaps the most unpleasant thing about this movie is in it's screaming sensationalism, and if you was waiting, like I was, for a Wilder kind of noir, with a misty talk and sight, with more leisureliness to it, then this running barefoot lady would certainly send you to a ditch. One have to consider the movie in his mind not as a routine straight forward noir genre picture with it's strict well-known rules but as a whirlpool of fear and despair, as a step by step descent into the nightmare (it reminded me of Dementia). This way, we can easily forgive the director his little overdoings like unbrushed, sometimes even hysterical, hard-boiling a la Fuller, with tough guy slapping everybody left and right in almost a farce manner and women sweating out in despair. And some exceptional cinematography, joined with the most bizarre MacGuffin in the movie history, certainly helps us to see the movie that way.
Near Dark
As somebody already mentioned somewhere, despite the fact that this is obviously a b-movie, with rather modest production values, it certainly has some charm to it, something that makes it quite unforgettable. Maybe it is because of it's unpretentiousness. Or maybe it is because everything in it is taken for granted, without a pile of explanations and introductions, like in the Spielberg's movies where all the gimmicks are explained carefully during the half of the movie.
And it seems that along with my old sympathy for Jenny Wright I also developed a soft spot for Tangerine Dream soundtracks.