Veronica Mars: Noir Hidden in Teen Angst

by Jorge Molina

The thing about noir is that, at its purest, most classic, most Maltese-Falcon-iest form, it’s a fairly recognizable genre. The character tropes are clear, the themes are evident, and the stylistic elements jump off the screen. For the most part, you know a film noir when you see one.

However, the more interesting members of the genre are those that won’t have a smoky detective office telling you that what you’re about to watch. They either subvert the learned expectations of the noir, or they hide them in original packaging...

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Beauty vs Beast: Love Bound

Jason from MNPP here back from turkey break and prepping a fresh "Beauty vs Beast" for y'all to feast upon. The Spanish provocateur Pedro Almodovar's latest film Julieta (which our pal Manuel reviewed right here via the New York Film Festival) opens in the U.S. in just a couple of weeks and so the Museum of Modern Art is celebrating all things Almodovar with a great big retrospective, starting tomorrow. The series runs through mid-December and they're showing pretty much everything he's made - don't miss out!

And so in turn for this week's "Beauty vs Beast" I'm asking you to look back to Almodovar's 1990 romantic comedy of kinky kidnapping, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (aka ¡Átame!) and its rope-crossed lovers -- Ricky (Antonio Banderas), fresh off the psych ward, and Marina (Victoria Abril), the actress and recovered drug addict who finds herself on the receiving end of Ricky's deranged affections.

PREVIOUSLY Last week's contest between Gaston and The Beast from Disney's Beauty & the Beast went back and forth and back and forth between the two big strapping hairy-chested menfolk in belle's life for awhile, but in the end true romance won out - y'all softies - and The Beast took it home with 55% of your vote. Said Nick T:

"Kudos to Gaston for having such a great song, but The Beast is such a lovely character. Even if my memory of him is blurrier, it's still warm."

The Furniture: Porches and Nostalgia in Hell or High Water

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. Here's Daniel Walber...

The Old West has been dead since well before the dawn of cinema, and so the best Westerns are parables of a way of life in decline. Yet despite the history, there are plenty for whom the mythology of the cowboy and the outlaw isn’t extinct. That’s why the Western has lived on, well after the death of even the oldest Americans who could remember those days. It’s also what drives films like Hell or High Water, which use symbols to chronicle the last days of the Old West’s cultural descendants.

It takes place in a nearly empty West Texas, now being picked over by banks. Taylor Sheridan’s script is insistent in its reminders of this context. “No wonder my kids won’t do this shit for a living,” says an anonymous cattle rancher fleeing an encroaching fire. “The days of robbing banks and trying to live to spend the money - long gone,” says an anonymous old man in a burger joint.

This is why the surface tension between the criminal brothers (Ben Foster and Chris Pine) and the aging Texas Ranger (Jeff Bridges) is a red herring...

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With Six You Get Linkroll

Towleroad Florence Henderson, "Mrs Brady" herself, dies at 82
Letterboxd "movies where jessica chastain gets fed up with the useless men around her so she decides to save the world herself"
EW Martin Scorsese's Silence to get world premiere at The Vatican
Medium "a letter to Tom Ford from a fat moviegoer" regarding Nocturnal Animals
Coco Hits NY finds Moana distractingly relevant to the current political situation
Elle Magazine all the different women who've played Jackie Kennedy (amazing, really)
The New Yorker the evolution of Pedro Almodóvar

oops that was seven links 

Exit Video
Doctor Strange as 8 bit game

They only do this for action and genre flicks since they're a natural fit but wouldn't it be satirical fun to do it for an unexpected non-teen boy favorite like say... Carol or The Hours?

Say What? John Boyega

Manuel here with a pretty picture to get our week started. 

What is John Boyega thinking about as he shoots scenes for the sequel for that other sci-fi franchise-to-be Pacific Rim: Maelstorm?