Cleveland City: The Screenplay

The Femme Fatale is a staple in traditional Noir. The glance, the lipstick, the heels. She's a force to be reckoned with and no one dares to stand in her way. This hasn't necessarily been the case in Neo Noir - there was only one female character in The Usual Suspects - Edie, the lawyer - and she was anything but dangerous or even central to the story. So what about these other women in Noir? The ones who aren't threatening to destroy men's lives or trying to manipulate the situation or run away with all the money? What about them? By the end of The Usual Suspects, Edie gets killed. In Mildred Pierce , it's not Joan Crawford's character that depicts the Femme Fatale, but, rather, her cruel and cold daughter Veda. Mildred gets stepped on by her one surviving child and by Monty, the lover who hooks both of them into their own beds. In Double Indemnity , as Barbara Stanwyck's Phyllis orchestrates her killer plan, it's her stepdaughter Lola, who...

"Young mothers love me even ghosts of Girlfriends call from Cleveland They will meet me anytime and anywhere" - Day I Die by The National In any great film noir, there's a love story.  Double Indemnity. Mildred Pierce. Blade Runner. The commonality they all share is that is in each tale of passion, heat and killer dialog, one party loves the other more. In some cases, they're not loved back in return. At all. Worse off? The man or woman to whom they give heir hearts and give up everything have simply used them as a means to an end. Once the desired outcome is achieved those fallen into the swoon of it all are left with nothing. Sometimes sent to jail. And in the most tragic noir? They die. There is no riding into the sunset together. When it comes to showing the pain of heartbreak, visually and viscerally film noir works stronger than any other genre.  Recent studies have shown that in bad break ups, the heart has the same physical reaction as it does...

"We're not computers, Sebastian, we're physical." - Rutger Hauer, Blade Rutger I write this blog every Sunday night. As I transition out of the weekend and prepare for the week ahead, seems like whatever time of day I sit down to write this, the news hits. And this entire season the news has been hitting hard. We all know what happened today. And regarding that, I don't have any words. I've been thinking a lot about what's happening right now and I've come to the conclusion that, once again, we are living in Noir Times. In The Film Experience , the authors point out, "Like the ending in Chinatown , many of the variations in these crime film formulas may be the product of changing times. With the Great Depression, Prohibition and urban crowding and unrest, the crime film of the 1930s acted out social instabilities through the marginal success of a marginal detective, like Sam Spade and others. In the 1970s, after the government corrupti...