L.A. Confidential - 1997 -
Period settings support the story and are neither intrusive, nor useless nostalgia exercises.
American Modern Noir at its best
NEO NOIR
During the 1980s, signs of rejuvenation of the genre were apparent. It was in the way stories were told on the screen, often with an intricate montage of sequences, or with an introduction of some TV-like filming of some shots, and above all, with a big return to HB values in the plots and characters. Noir is still present, but the HB ingredients have become more obvious and the level of violence has escalated. Is it moral or physical. The devil's pot of this contemporary Noir is sometime qualified as "neo noir".
Heat -1995
Masterfully staged, the action scenes (see picture, left) showing professional outlaws are not here gratuitous inserts of graphic violence. The existential undertones of the script give to the central characters real life dimensions, contributing to make of 'Heat' a remarkably balanced mainstream Noir film.
This is, however, not to be confused with the action and comics-like style of plots found recently in movies that Hollywood has designed, to showcase visual effects.
In this brand of low value films, the central characters are given the abilities of super-heroes of the American comics...sans tights. And plus machine guns! These pastiches are only action films mixed with some HB and Noir ingredients, ingredients that never really fit with these films--just like a tentatively spicy late addition to a tasteless meal. And most of the time, extremely graphic violence in these movies serves no purpose except to mesmerize an unaware audience.
Generally speaking, we could say that in the 1990s, the quality of an American HB film is inversely proportional(*) to the number of explosions graphically depicted!! We do not even think that this should be said as a joke...
(*) for those of you who had skipped those boring math classes, in plain English it means: less is best
RETURN OF THE B FILMS!
Dark, desperate and violent!Kateshi Kitano, original Japanese director (who started as an actor) is the creative engine of interesting Japanese Noir films.
(<<< see still on the left)
Besides quality HB plots found in some mainstream film productions of the 90s, a new resurgence of HB films in the B series has brought about a distinctive mood, by a kind of tradition linked to pure HB plots. Often despised, as they are relegated to the lowest of TV films, or to the worst of the series Z copycats, these new B films harbor some gems: fast crime action, energetic protagonists, efficient filming, contemporary settings, and mostly desperate endings depicting clashes with a corrupted world, exactly like the pulps or the HB novels of the 30s and 40s. Of course there are Noir elements in these evolutionary "new B's", but they are only second to their strong hard-boiled aspects that are more orientated towards nihilism than were the existentialist undertones of classic and modern Noir.
PULP FICTION...OR BEWARE TARANTINIZATION
We are not speaking here about 'Pulp Fiction' (by Tarentino) and the like, which are pastiches only, and... dead ends for the HB genre! The cuckoo effect that these authors are providing, by nesting within a genre they admire formally, but that they really do not understand, just provides empty stylistic exercises that border on parody and that most of the time, are as worthless as a TV music clip.
Pushed to its limits, and if confused with the future of the HB film, these exercises will just bring about derision, mechanical repeats, and the end of the genre by systematic self-parody. We have nothing against good parodies, but we cannot accept when the parody is assimilated into the genre itself!
These would-be wonderboys really did not understand what made the great movies that were done in the past , even the not so distant ones.
Their sterile exercises are not the "new B" films to which we refer, at any moment, in our comments on the present hard-boiled and Noir films.
FOREIGN PRODUCTIONS
As underlined in our introductory text, the mid-80s and certainly the 90s saw a complete supremacy of the American productions invading the European Cineplexes and... TV stations.
Especially successful were the American action, thriller, gore, and crime movies that had incredible budgets for production and that targeted a younger (teenagers and young adults) theater audience. From time to time, mysteries and assimilated films received the same treatment, making it difficult for foreign production teams to compete for the prime audience.
The quality was not in question, only quantity and appeal to the new cinema-goers for these foreign films. The result is, that apart from disseminating productions, there is no more influential current of evolution for HB and Noir that comes from outside America.
France is still producing thrillers and "films policiers", but most of them remain mainstream, and less innovative than what was produced there during the 60s and 70s. Everywhere else, it is occasional, close to rare- as with British and Italian films now strongly declining in number of production per year, in any genre.
HONG KONG?
Many have tried to see the future of the HB film as coming from Hong Kong.
This is a pure commercial overexaggeration, created by the Hollywood film industry, mostly producers, film makers, and writers, who saw in the violent Hong Kong caricatures of the HB movies of the West, an easy model for more gory and violent graphic descriptions in non-existing plots, with TV clip-style sequences for their films. All spoke to the lower emotions, not requiring the intelligence of the viewer for comprehension... exactly what they think is requested by an audience trained to see TV serials mixed with non-stop publicity clips and that finds breaks in ultra-violent video games!
This way is not better than Tarantino's for the future of HB/Noir, mainly because it misses strong characterization of the protagonists, justification of the violence, and believable realistic plots, all essential ingredients to real HB/Noir.
Even the best of HK crime movies are still copycats of existing films produced in the West, reproduced with a total lack of invention(left: The Killer by Johm Woo- 1989)
As for Hong Kong productions, even if it looks like a biased opinion, I cannot find any real achievements, even amongst the best films of the HB genre that they have produced, as they always lacked the sufficient degree of characterization so necessary for good films.