Film Noir Conventions

'The Postman Always Knocks Twice' (1946)

A dark city street bathed in shadows.
A seedy office with “Investigations” stenciled on the door.
A winding road along the ocean cliffs.
An isolated house on the outskirts of town.

The scenes of film noir are all disturbingly familiar, as are the archetypal characters:
the hard-boiled detective,
the dangerously alluring femme fatale,
and the well-heeled villain surrounded by gun-toting thugs.

But even so, it is the visual style – canted camera angles, deep-focus shots, high-contrast lighting – and ultimately subversive message that are the hallmarks of classic film noir.

Learn more about the genre here.

Can film trailers reveal too much too soon?

Marketing a film in the digital age can be tricky to get right. There's perpetual tug of war between fans who want to find out about the film before its release and the film companies who want to protect their project; at the same time, film-makers also want to promote and create excitement about their films by giving the fans snippets of what they want.

But consider this: in a situation where the fans think they have won the tug of war by extracting snippets of new information about a particular film, it could be that the film company marketing gurus have simply let go of the rope. A few days ago, for example, pictures of Joel Kinnaman surfaced online, wearing a thoroughly un-robotic Robocop suit on the set of José Padilha's new remake. Despite the largely negative reaction from fans and bloggers, the pictures got people talking passionately about the film. A savvy marketing coup? It's not beyond the realms of possibility that these pictures may even have been leaked by the film company.

Giving the fans what they want can, however, be a dangerous game to play. Earlier this year Ridley Scott's film Prometheus launched what must be one of the most impressive marketing campaigns ever; it even included a company website for the fictional Weyland Enterprises and a video of a fictional TED talk launching the Prometheus project. Combine this with the release of multiple viral video trailers and you have the perfect example of a hype-building, excitement-inducing machine. The campaign took the film to a $380m global box-office takings, but a question remains: did Prometheus' marketing strategy give too much away?

The bombardment from grandiose marketing strategies shows no sign of letting up, however – and we are now seeing almost as much attention directed towards the first airing of official trailers as we have towards the release of the film proper. The teaser trailer has, of course, been around for ages, but the pomp and circumstance surrounding their release has taken a step up lately. Steven Spielberg's new biopic Lincoln offered a 44-second trailer advertising the official premiere of the full trailer on Google, followed by a webcast with Spielberg himself. This may engage the fans, but the whole process is getting very close to the edge of parody. How long before we get a trailer for the teaser trailer?

On top of this, trailers themselves are getting longer, with most official ones clocking in at well over two minutes in length. This means that, assuming there are two or three trailers released for a film, you already have over five minutes of footage to examine before you've even thought about buying a ticket.  It's the equivalent of giving away all but the last chapter of your book for free in the hope that people will cough up for the final chapter.

Do film companies really think this plan is just about crazy enough to work? But the day will surely come when they reveal too much, extinguishing the desire to see the film itself.

Edited from: guardian.co.uk

A Guide to Film Noir

'Double Indemnity' (1944)

Roger Ebert / January 30, 1995

Film noir is . . .

1. A French term meaning "black film," or film of the night, inspired by the Series Noir, a line of cheap paperbacks that translated hard-boiled American crime authors and found a popular audience in France.

2. A movie which at no time misleads you into thinking there is going to be a happy ending.

3. Locations that reek of the night, of shadows, of alleys, of the back doors of fancy places, of apartment buildings with a high turnover rate, of taxi drivers and bartenders who have seen it all.

4. Cigarettes. Everybody in film noir is always smoking, as if to say, "On top of everything else, I've been assigned to get through three packs today." The best smoking movie of all time is "Out of the Past," in which Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas smoke furiously at each other. At one point, Mitchum enters a room, Douglas extends a pack and says, "Cigarette?" and Mitchum, holding up his hand, says, "Smoking."

5. Women who would just as soon kill you as love you, and vice versa.

6. For women: low necklines, floppy hats, mascara, lipstick, dressing rooms, boudoirs, calling the doorman by his first name, high heels, red dresses, elbowlength gloves, mixing drinks, having gangsters as boyfriends, having soft spots for alcoholic private eyes, wanting a lot of someone else's women, sprawling dead on the floor with every limb meticulously arranged and every hair in place.

7. For men: fedoras, suits and ties, shabby residential hotels with a neon sign blinking through the window, buying yourself a drink out of the office bottle, cars with running boards, all-night diners, protecting kids who shouldn't be playing with the big guys, being on first-name terms with homicide cops, knowing a lot of people whose descriptions end in "ies," such as bookies, newsies, junkies, alkys, jockeys and cabbies.

8. Movies either shot in black and white, or feeling like they were.

9. Relationships in which love is only the final flop card in the poker game of death.

10. The most American film genre, because no society could have created a world so filled with doom, fate, fear and betrayal, unless it were essentially naive and optimistic.

Pitt says big movie salaries 'have died'

Actor reckons that studios don't have the money to pay the vast wages seen in the past
Brad Pitt has said that the days of astronomical salaries for Hollywood actors are over.

The A-list actor, who is reported to have made $25 million (£16 million) last year according to Forbes, reckons that such wage packets are a thing of the past.

“Yeah, that thing died,” he told Radio 1's Newsbeat when asked if actors could still take home $10 million (£6.2 million) for a single film role.

“That arithmetic doesn't really work right now... that deal's not flying these days. You take the roles for the roles, and you've just got to balance economics like everyone does.”

He adds that while the economic downturn has affected film studios adversely, it means it's now giving opportunities to lesser known talent.

“A lot of the studios have been challenged because of the economic downturn as well so they've been betting on bigger, more tent pole kinds of things.

“At the same time that opens up a vacuum for really interesting new film makers to come in.”

The idea of the 'tent-pole' projects run by the major studios is that they then bankroll the smaller projects.

Source: yahoo movies

'Loom': Sci-fi short film from Luke Scott

He is an acclaimed commercial director who has pushed through his work to step out of the shadow of his father, Ridley Scott.  And now Luke Scott is transcending boundaries in video technology with a visually-arresting 20-minute short film, 'Loom'.

Shot in coordination with RED Camera, the sci-fi short features Giovanni Ribisi and Jellybean Howie, although cinematographer Dariusz Wolski just might be its star.

A film shot completely in 4K format in the tone and style of Ridley Scott's dystopian 'Blade Runner'. The film was originally intended to help showcase the prototype REDray 3D laser player. The film was constructed for 3D, the film needed to push the limits of the cameras exposure sensitivity and colour range and 4K projection. Visually the film is unmatched to date in it's use of RED's new technology.