an all woman cast in new york high society calls for a bunch of stars playing type with glee. suffering divorcee, strong independent woman and husband stealing bitch by joan crawford. and the thing that they all discuss the most is men- how to please them, how to keep them, how to ditch them.
the pitfall in the insurance man’s suburban boredom with wife and child happens when in search for adventure he has a one night stand with the girlfriend of convict. turns out that the real bad man here is the ex-cop who now scans potential insurance beneficiaries who also lusts after the same woman. ‘stay in the suburbs!’ the film screams out- american men don’t have the intelligence to understand the complexities of the city.
then there was howards hawks fantastic version of the raymond chandler 'the big sleep'. lauren bacall plays the sexy seductress to humphrey bogart's philp marlowe. she is smarter one of the two daughters of a rich biollionaire being blackmailed. The twists go on forever and so do the one-liners.
another noir, but recent, takes off from a self conscious noir graphic novel- whose central character is a snarling detective with dead wife looking for revenge. a banned drug makes victims see black bird fly through the sky before they tear your body to pieces. this one is very forgettable.
jia zhang ke’s documentary ‘dong’ made parallel with the gorgeous ‘still life’ pales in comparison. the staged long pans over the ruins of cities in the three gorges valley are intercut with a narrative of a neorealist painter trying to paint laborers in the landscape. this is the first half which ends with a cringe inducing sequence when the painter goes with photographs and toys for the wife and children of the laborers he has painted in the their distant home town. the second half follows the painter as he goes up and down bangkok’s various transportation systems and tries to paint an array of women who are probably sex workers.
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