The MoFo Top Neo-noir Countdown - Preliminary Thread

Woooooooòoooooooooo!!!!

Alriiight! John W. Constantine has the honor of being the very first one to submit a ballot. Now, I'm gonna scrutinize that ballot like a MoFo

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Two ballots in, we cookin!

I got two ballots in too, tied!

I just submitted mine!

A new case has been brought up to the office on the Neo-noir Scavenge Hunt thread. Go check it out and participate!

Out of the first two Neo-noir Scavenge Hunt groups, half of the titles are higly considered for my ballor:

The Naked Kiss (1964)
Le Samouraï (1967)
Chinatown (1974)
Blade Runner (1982)
Red Rock West (1993)
Bound (1996)
Jackie Brown (1997)
Mulholland Drive (2001)
The Man Who Wasn't There (2001)
Mother (2009)
Drive (2011)

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"Population don't imitate art, population imitate bad television." W.A.
"You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus." M.T.

Yeah, a bunch of those are lock-ins for me.

The Seven Ups

3 1/2 stars

Pretty good Neo noir featuring Roy Scheider leading a group of cops who operate outside the law. When they’re dragged into a case involving men masquerading as officers to kidnap and ransom prominent mob figures, it becomes personal.
Features a wonderful car chase that outshines The French Connection and is on par with Bullitt.

There was sort of a boom in Neo Noir in the early 1990s. Your guess as to why is as good as anybody's. May have had something to do with sex selling, and a sultry noir-ish tale was a relatively inexpensive way to deliver it, especially in the burgeoning Independent Film scene? Maybe because the younger crop of filmmakers were the first VHS/cable and second film school generation and they were keen to either remake or pay homage to classic Noirs? Whatever the reasons, Neo Noir was definitely a thing to start the 1990s.



Some were straight-up remakes. Scorsese's Cape Fear (1991) with Nick Nolte and Robert DeNiro is a remake of J. Lee Thompson's 1962 potboiler starring Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum, Michael Cimino's Desperate Hours (1990) with Mickey Rourke and Anthony Hopkins updated William Wyler's 1955 effort starring Bogart and Fredric March, Peter Hayams' Narrow Margin (1990) with Gene Hackman and Anne Archer remakes Richard Fleischer's 1952 flick starring Charles McGraw and Marie Windsor, Steven Soderbergh's stylish The Underneath (1995) starring Peter Gallagher and William Fichtner is a remake of Robert Siodmak's Criss Cross {1949) starring Burt Lancaster and Dan Duryea, Barbet Schroeder's Kiss of Death (1995) with David Caruso and Nic Cage reworks Henry Hathaway's 1955 classic starring Victor Mature and Richard Widmark, Irwin Winkler's Night and the City (1992) with Bob DeNiro and Jessica Lange was a reworking of Jules Dassin's 1950 flick starring Richard Widmark and Gene Tierney, James Dearden's A Kiss Before Dying (1991) with Sean Young and Matt Dillon remakes the 1956 Gerd Oswald flick starring Joanne Woodward and Robert Wagner, Tamra Davis' debut Guncrazy (1992) with Drew Barrymore and James LeGros updates the 1950 poverty row classic Gun Crazy with Peggy Cummins and John Dall, and Roger Donaldson's The Getaway (1994) with then-husband and wife Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger is a remake of Peckinpah's 1972 Neo Noir starring Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw.



Besides being remakes, most of those were also novels, and this period also saw new adaptations of classic pulp crime writers including Stephen Frears' The Grifters (1990) starring John Cusack, Angelica Huston, and Annette Bening, James Foley's After Dark, My Sweet (1990) with Jason Patric, Rachel Ward, and Bruce Dern, Maggie Greenwald's The Kill-Off (1990) and The Getaway all from Jim Thompson novels. Dennis Hopper's The Hot Spot (1990) starring Don Johnson, Virginia Madsen, and Jennifer Connelly is adapted from Charles Williams' Hell Hath No Fury, and Phillip Noyce's claustrophobic thriller Dead Calm (1989) starring Sam Neill, Nicole Kidman, and Billy Zane is another one of his novels. George Armitage's Miami Blues (1990) with Alec Baldwin, Fred Ward, and Jennifer Jason Leigh updates a Charles Wileford book.



And then there were those original scripts that were very clearly paying homage to pulp novels and Noir cinema like Carl Franklin's One False Move (1992) with Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton, Kenneth Branagh's Dead Again (1991) with Emma Thompson, Peter Medak's Romeo is Bleeding (1993) with Gary Oldman and Lena Olin, Danny Boyle's Shallow Grave (1994) starring Ewan McGregor and Chris Eccleston, Mike Figgis' Liebestraum (1991) with Kevin Anderson and Bill Pullman, Wolfgang Petersen's Shattered (1991) with Tom Berenger and Bob Hoskins, Bob Rafelson's Blood & Wine (1996) with Jack Nicholson and Michael Caine, and John Dahl alone made three Noir tributes in this period in Kill Me Again (1989) with Val Kilmer & Joanne Whalley, Red Rock West (1993) with Nic Cage and Dennis Hopper, and The Last Seduction (1994) with Bill Pullman and Linda Fiorentino.


You could make a pretty tasty and very legit Top 25 almost from this period alone.

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"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra

Our third case is already on the docket for all of you on the Neo-noir Scavenge Hunt thread. Are you doing your part?

That is a beautiful post, Holden, and I agree about this boom. I would also add a couple of titles like Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead (with Andy Garcia), Suicide Kings (with Christopher Walken), Wild Things, Oliver Stone's U-Turn, 2 Days in the Valley, and Malice with one of the best scenery chewings from Alec Baldwin's career.

Already checked for eligibility, not previously mentioned Neo-Noirs:

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Eligibility check request @Thief and @Holden Pike

Dirty Harry 1971
King of New York 1990

Glengarry Glen Ross 1992

Carlito's Way 1993

Heat 1995
Breakdown 1997
Inside Man 2006

Glengarry Glen Ross? Really?

I don't know how people make their MoFo genre lists, but I think some must just look at your top six hundred titles on Letterboxd or wherever else you have your personal ratings catalogued and then work your way down from number one, trying to squint and see if you can make something fit the genre rather than think about what the genre is and which films best embody it?

My big wish was that Noir and Neo Noir be separated, which happily they have been. Now that we are here in Neo Noir, if people want to essentially waste their votes on things that aren't obviously eligible but maybe kinda sorta around the edges qualify but nobody else is reasonably ever going to consider it for their lists....I mean, go ahead, I guess? If it makes one feel good to pick things that have zero chance of making the collective just to prove how out-of-the-box your mind works, I say bless you, have at it. You are allowed compile a list full of defacto "one-pointers" where you are the only person who voted for titles up and down your ballot instead of looking at the genre and making some choices. As somebody who has run a couple of these lists and one of them was a genre, I will say this well I know nobody else considers it eligible but I voted for it anyway attitude makes it very difficult to get any kind of consensus and have a legit, well-rounded Top 100. But, if it's more fun for you to throw votes away, go ahead and chuck as many as you want.



Admittedly Neo Noir is difficult to define, but the basic idea is that it either hits upon similar themes and/or uses similar tropes and trappings as Noir while updating them. Many Classic Films Noir involved crimes and criminals, but the crimes are the plots, not the themes. The French critics who coined the term saw connections in many of these post-WWII Hollywood B-pictures that instead of celebrating American exceptionalism or embracing the sunny hope of the American dream took stylish turns to the dark underbelly and characters who either had no access to that dream or made such poor choices that they removed themselves from its light. Visually and stylistically their cinematic DNA was often from the German Expressionistic school, with shadows and distorted perspective conveying isolation and fear and despair. Film Noir literally means "dark film", both visually and thematically.

When you get to Neo Noir the cultural context is of course very different. By the 1970s and '80s society as a whole had moved on from the optimism of the Eisenhower era, thanks to assassinations, war, Watergate, economic inequalities, etc. Meaning in terms of Noir, it can't simply still be juxtaposition to the light of the mainstream because that light was more complicated and much less bright. Classic Noir had plenty of nihilism, but Neo Noir could depict it much more completely. That doesn't mean that every movie about pessimistic criminals is Neo Noir, nor does having rain and shadows automatically qualify you. Unfortunately for the sake of composing a group list, that makes it inherently difficult as their is no clear definition. It comes down to themes and tone and intent. Mostly what that means is it is open to a lot of interpretation. If you want to call Glengarry Glen Ross or Carlito's Way or whatever else you feel fits Neo Noir, you may. But knowing that only one of our "sources" is labeling it as such should clue you in that it is probably debatable for most and that you may well be voting for something that very few other ballots are even going to consider and therefore nobody else will vote for. To me it seems difficult enough to build consensus among the titles that most if not all sources across the board agree qualify as Neo Noir without adding in odd ducks and special cases. There are so many titles from the 1960s onward that are widely labeled Neo Noir. Why not just focus on them?


But this is not my MoFo List, those decisions are all up to @Thief. I am simply an unpaid consultant.

Just asking, thanks for your elaborate answer.
None of the films I asked about are on my current list, but I have seen them on other 'cinephile' lists. I wasn't sure about a couple of them because I've last seen them 30+ years ago. So if the host or you gives the greenlight on them I would re-watch them so I can make up my own opinion about listing them.

I've been out all day so I'm just catching up, but thanks to Holden for that insightful reply. The elegibility rules are there to set some tangible boundaries, but I think that pushing those should be a last resort. In line with what Holden said, I think it's better for the countdown to stay more or less within the playground. The farther you go to the fences, the more isolated from the rest you'll be. But at the end of the day, it's up to each and everyone to decide how to vote.

Also, I think it's a good moment to say that, although I will try to peek at each ballot as I receive them, I will do so mostly to check for any absurd choices. At the end of the day, each of you have access to the elegibility rules. It's infinitely easier for each of you to check and double-check your 25 picks than it would be for me to check hundreds of picks; especially as the final weeks approach, so do your due dilligence. Thanks to everybody!

For what it's worth, personally, the only one I see as being "neo-noir" from this bunch is, maybe, King of New York and that's still pushing it a bit. The others are crime thrillers or mere thrillers, or in the case of Glengarry Glen Ross, just a drama. But that's just my personal appreciation. If they are eligible and you feel like voting for them, then go ahead.

[narrator's voice]

It was a time of chaos. I was moving to a new abode, adjusting my bearings, still getting used to my new surroundings. Everything else fell into second place. I just couldn't concentrate, couldn't find my mind-space. It was the worst of times but I had to get back on the groove. People were counting on me.

[end of narrator's voice]

Just finished Nightmare Alley (2021).
Del Toro unfortunately follows the original too closely, and what we have is an imitation of the first film, rather than a film that holds up on its own merits. Somehow, the film seems sterile, despite capturing the same look and feel as the original. Perhaps that’s the problem. Outside of some good performances, particularly Dafoe, Strathairn, Collette, and especially Blanchett. Even Bradly Cooper is good on this.

None of that matter, however, if the film doesn’t stand out from the original enough to warrant such lofty expectations that were cast upon it.

Not a bad film, but merely ok. Missed opportunity here.