chaos-rampant This has the basic fulcrum of noir; red-haired devilish femme fatale, the schmuck who is bedeviled by desire for sex and money, looking bamboozled while being smitten by cruelly ironic fate, desire that bends reality and manifests in offbeat ways. I do like that we have it dictating metaphorical spaces of being lured and trapped by that desire.A hole in the ground that he has to keep feeding with money. Watching through binoculars at sex across the street, inflamming the desire. A dream where he's inside a giant ferry wheel and buffed around while she is playing his life at dice down below. The embarrassment of rolling on the floor with her when his colleagues walk through the door. It ends in an aptly noirish way, quoting Detour, where he's been the narrator gone mad as he waits hopelessly in some desert limbo, flicking through the photo-album that chronicles a life wasted when desire entered the pictures and all this (diner, photos) as being trapped in his own mind that relives the past and is conjuring the film itself.Even that is rather intermittent here, not the result of focused vision like the Coens or Almodovar did. Truth be told, I'm simply not too enamored of the obviousness that accompanies many of these modern attempts at film noir. It's like an excessively made up face wearing with some effort a selfconscious grimace as it makes its way through the amoral occasion. For whatever reason I am reminded a lot of Lynne's attempt at Lolita; something that was elusively fluid in its original guise, stultified by too much focus on grooming appearances.Oldman affects his usual twitching self, rather apt in the whole thing. The femme fatale can be overtly sexual in ways she couldn't in Hays code days.Noir Meter: 3/4 | Neo-noir or post noir? Neo

A_Different_Drummer which strictly speaking should not be stealable in the first place.I mean, on the surface this is one of those oddball in-color "film noire" gangstery films which Hollywood has become so fond of recently.It has an especially clever script and reminds me in subtle ways of the many cross-arcs in Lucky Number Slevin.The two stars Gary Oldman and Lena Olin both do not usually get the chance to do a star turn, they are both very under-used as primary characters, and that should be the end of the review.But it is not. Olin gives an extraordinary performance, part sensuality, part evil genius, part crazy. By the end of the film she makes Kevin Spacey look like a chartered accountant.Also a nice cautionary tale on letting your reach exceed your grasp.Extraordinary. Highly recommended.

Samiam3 Jack Grimaldi of New York's finest has been doing petty jobs for a mob which the department has been going after. He gets a few thousand dollars with every job, and he adds it to a pile hidden in his backyard. His latest job is to take out the Russian assassin, who he just arrested the other day. While in his custody she offers him an even better deal with more money. But first , he has to fake her death, getting him clean with the boss, and then he must get out of the mob gig before he gets caught. Things are getting tougher with each passing moment.The whole thing doesn't come together very well. Romeo is Bleeding would have been better with the less is more approach. Some details like Jack's involvement with three different women, and the stiff necked feds (who only appear twice) prove fairly useless to the story. Their screen time may have been a bit more worth while, if anyone bothered to act well. The only good performance is Roy Scheider. This guy has never done a bad movie, and his one talky scene is actually a pretty good one, certainly the best in the film. Him aside, there are two kinds of performances in Romeo is Bleeding; there are the lazy ones, and there are the hammy ones. Gary Oldman is a case of the former. This is not the kind of person we end up caring for. The ending, which is supposed to earn our sympathy instead earns our impatience. It has an overwritten melodramatic monologue which drags on way too long. Romeo is Bleeding delivers the classic 'noir' first person narration. If it had done a better job of explaining the story as it unfolded rather than the tiny little voice in Oldman's head, I think that would have also been an improvement on the filmWhen all is said and done, Romeo is Bleeding qualifies as a swing and a miss. It is in desperate need of a rewrite, an energy boost, and some brains. I'll have to say skip this one.

Carson Trent But it is Oldman with his lack of inspiration who pushes this collection of random plagiarized film noir clichés into the self dug grave, as he moonwalks thru the entire movie obviously too stoned and drunk to let anything show on his wax like facial expression he carries around here. The script is a mess, as we are being served an already cold meal of voice-over detective story with a limp, ludicrous plot points like the one where Mona waits for Jack to arrive to kill her, just so she can talk him into killing Falcone and set her up with a new identity, him falling for it when he could have easily got out, as it was already clear he had to kill at least one person. They blame it on the voice, but actually it's the dumb alter ego of both director and writer who is at fault. And the casting director, because given some chemistry between Jack and Mona, his moves might have been more understandable. Oldman, terribly miscast here, fails to portray an average Joe, mainly due to his emotional over the top acting style, more fit for a conflicted crack addict, or a flamboyant pimp, but under no circumstances a functional guy in society. The slow witted story teller walks us thru what is supposed to make us witness the down fall of a guy who gets stuck inside his own web of mistakes, but as it turns out, the only part credible enough is the one where he drives himself into a pole losing all his leverage. The whole things rapidly plunges from laughable to dumb and pretentious crapolo, and finally to involuntarily breaking the fifth wall, and making the viewer search for the remote control. Terrible and boring. What a combo.