randyuns-34804 Amazing cast, acting, screenplay. If you Love 50s style police dramas, this is for you. In the style of Philip Marlowe. Don't miss this classic.

chaos-rampant I saw this together with Devil in a Blue Dress for a night of surveying how noir - the first modern genre - has evolved as our modern world has. And what a world of difference they make.Both are set in the 40s and minutely try to recreate the era. Both are about women who have disappeared (here she turns up dead), a set of incriminating images and conspiracy that goes all the way up. Both derive from The Big Sleep, this one via Chinatown.But Devil felt alive, it had a measure of real desperation, urgency in the noir, a sense of place that lingered and enveloped. There was a very cogent reason for it to be set in a time of rampant discrimination against black people.This, it's not even noir, merely set in a time of noir movies. They put the same hats that people in film noir movies used to wear, the Buicks they drove, the same shiny recreation of an era as LA Confidential, but it's dead, has no pulse, and to treat noir like a period piece when it was a modern thing in its time (those were just the hats people wore) is to suck all its life away and leave us with a mannequin doll propped up on a stage.You'll know it by looking at the plot of passionate lovemaking that the head cop recalls, which is the defining moment in noir, the narrator succumbing to desire that sucks him into a devious story, captured as in Big Sleep by a hidden camera. Had he not had fallen for her, she would have been just another body when found, he would never have entered the story. But it's like a cardboard box painted like an engine, it just looks the part.No, it's simply a style that is being regurgitated here with no understanding by actors wearing noir clothes. Badly written and a TV-level of imagination to boot, as close to the noir world as a James Bond spoof is to the world of spying.Noir Meter: 1/4

SnoopyStyle It's 1950s L.A. Lieutenant Maxwell Hoover (Nick Nolte), Coolidge (Chazz Palminteri), Hall (Michael Madsen) and Relyea (Chris Penn) are a squad of rough LAPD detectives who throw bad guys off a hill on Mulholland Drive. They investigate the murder of Allison Pond (Jennifer Connelly) who actually is linked to Hoover. They uncover secretly filmed sex sessions as well as the Nevada Atomic Testing Site. They are threatened by Colonel Fitzgerald (Treat Williams). She also had an affair with General Thomas Timms (John Malkovich), head of Atomic Energy Commission.It's a tightly wound neo-noir. Connelly is a sort-of-femme-fatale on celluloid. Maybe they should have included a sister following the investigation in the present. The flashback aren't as interesting. Nick Nolte is good at being hard but his desperation needs to be heightened. This movie has most of the elements of a hard-boiled film noir but it does lack the sharp dialog. It needs more thrills to go along with the style.

Spikeopath Mulholland Falls is directed by Lee Tamahori and written by Pete Dexter. It stars Nick Nolte, Chazz Palminteri, Melanie Griffith, Michael Madsen, Chris Penn, Jennifer Connelly, Treat Williams, John Malkovich, Bruce Dern and Andrew McCarthy. Music is by Dave Grusin and cinematography by Haskell Wexler.1950s Los Angeles and four unorthodox detectives led by Maxwell Hoover (Nolte) are called in to investigate the death of a young woman found crushed at a construction site. The woman is revealed to be an aspiring actress who had recently had a relationship with the married Hoover. Can is open, and worms everywhere, and following those worms leads Hoover down murky avenues...It's the almost nearly great neo-noir movie, everything looks right in principal, it has a strongly assembled cast, the 50s visuals and cinematography are splendid, and the murder mystery element of the plot - with some added sex, sizzle and nuclear shenanigans - looks promising on the page. Yet it never delivers on that promise of being something dark, to be a labyrinthine noir thriller beating a black heart.It starts of so well, based on the infamous "Hat Squad" we reasonably expect the story to expand upon the opening macho machinations of the four tough hombres in the hats, but instead away from Nolte's grizzled Hoover, the other three guys are merely dressed up props. Which means there's some good actors wasted, sadly.As the plot moves slowly forward the investigation and Hoover character axis becomes less interesting. Griffith came in for some critical grief for a lacklustre performance, but she's done no favours by the writers who fail to give her marriage to Hoover any substance. So when things go pear shaped and the characters of Mr and Mrs Hoover should explode on the screen, we really don't care having had no interest previously to hang our emotional being on.It all builds to what can best be described as a poor pay off, the resolution to the hinted at muddy mystery is hardly shocking, and the "big" face-off sequence between good and bad guys (or bad and bad if you prefer) is about as exciting as watching paint dry. It's not an awful movie, but it is a very disappointing one. A film where a bit more thought given by the producers could have yielded so much more. 5/10