Ask Mick LaSalle: A name for angst-ridden movies
If we call the dark and moody detective movies from the mid-20th century “film noir,” what name can we give the existential-angst, character-driven films from the ’70s?
If you’re talking about Raymond Chandler adaptations, like “Farewell, My Lovely” (1975) or “The Big Sleep” (1978), you’d call those neo-noirs — as in noir films made with a self-conscious awareness of operating within a tradition.
Are there any sound remakes of silent films — and any English-language remakes of foreign films — that you feel do justice to the earlier versions whose popularity inspired them?
In terms of story, the 1931 “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” with Fredric March, is a remake of the 1920 silent version with John Barrymore, not an original take on the Robert Louis Stevenson story.
The films make a fascinating contrast because they use the same story to make opposite points.
The March version said that Hyde took over Jekyll because Jekyll had sexually healthy impulses that were denied because of a rigid social structure.
The movies show the changing attitudes toward sex and the increasing awareness of Freud’s work over the relatively short period of 11 years — but the March version is the much better film.
Not just the guy in the toga wearing a wristwatch, but verbal anachronisms? I loved “Carol,” but twice, the world “seriously” was used in a way it was never used in the ’50s.
Hard to believe that you can find so many things to trash in a beautiful film like “The Measure of a Man” and at the same time give the movie Popstar:
On one side you have this ambitious, heartfelt film about a serious subject, and on the other you have a ridiculous satire with no ambition but to make people laugh.
To want to make people laugh is a high calling, and to succeed at it isn’t easy.
Just that one song, “Finest Girl (Bin Laden Song),” is a brilliant copy of a particularly kind of clueless hip-hop love ballad, and at the same time it takes a crazy premise and keeps topping it, so that almost every line is funny.