BOUND (1996)

Apart from perhaps CLOUD ATLAS (which is technically a Wachowski/Tykwer film adaptation), the Wachowski sisters’ BOUND is probably their most under-seen and under-appreciated work which, sure, given it’s their first film, but still! It a very queer neo-noir that, while stylish, doesn’t rely on the gonzo effects of their later films. In fact, one of the most effective shots simply involves buckets of white paint, squibs, and a body.

The fact that it isn’t heralded more is a shame because it’s certainly an iconic queer film, and it’s also my favorite of theirs.

I’m getting ahead of myself. BOUND is a very simple neo-noir with a small cast, smaller locales — almost all of it takes place in two Chicago apartments which, I’ll note, has appropriate trim — and some smoldering, absolutely perfect casting.

Corky (Gina Gershon) is a very butch ex-con who served five years and is now reworking apartments for the mob. She meets the apartment’s next-door neighbors, the sexpot femme Violet (Jennifer Tilly, doing what she does best) is entangled with low-level mobster Caesar (Joe Pantoliano before he was on THE SOPRANOS). Corky and Violet get lustily involved via a number of very heated scenes and, as always, watch how they handle hands. Violet decides she wants to leave Caesar and be with Corky, so Violet fills Corky in on Caesar’s task to pick-up and hand-off over $2.1 million dollars to his mob bosses.

Corky brainstorms a plan to steal the money from under Caesar’s nose. It sounds like the perfect plan.

As this is a noir work, it is not the perfect plan. Matters escalate, and quickly.

It’s worth noting that half of this film works because Gershon and Tilly have amazing chemistry and an amazing wardrobe and suits each perfectly: Corky is all leather, tight white t-shirts and dirty pants and Violet is often dressed like Marilyn in GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES, all glamor dresses and finely coiffed hair. The other half is because of the Wachoswkis’ script — which is far more funny than I remember — but also because of the way they visually frame Corky and Violet’s tryst; it’s restrained, knows when to linger and when to cut away, but is still tantalizing.

I’ll grant that you can see a lot of the Coen Bros. in BOUND, from some Sonnefeld zooms and heightened close-ups to the humor, but out-of-the-gate you can tell these are more-or-less nods, and that the sisters have their own voice and approach.

Lastly: as usual, I saw this at the Music Box Theatre — it was a personal print from the Wachowskis! — as part of the Music Box’s ‘Rated Q’ series, which explicitly is — in the words of Rated Q’s programmer/director Ramona Slick — “A Celebration of Queer, Camp, & Cult Cinema”.

At the time of writing this, it’s Pride month and Chicago’s Pride parade is only a few days away.

Obviously, the screening was completely overflowing with queer folk and it was glorious.

The screening opened with a pre-film, brazenly and enthusiastically over-the-top drag show in the main theater: a lot of torn clothing, a lot of skin, and folks stuffing bills into the performers’ works or throwing money at them. (I’m not 100% sure that the Music Box is zoned for all that I saw, but I will not complain!) The audience was so, so very game for it.

When the film started? Folks went bonkers but, as is the Music Box way, no one ruined the experience for everyone; there was a lot of hooting, a lot of laughter, a lot of veiled recognition at foreshadowing and villainous characters, and a lot of clapping (and even some snaps). In other words, the perfect communal viewing experience.

If you read the interview with Rated Q’s Ramona Slick, they discuss how formative cult and queer films were for them, as they lived in a small town without much of a queer community. Now they’re helping to introduce others to these films in a way that interweaves performance with projection. It also gives a venue for those who love these films and want to see them with likeminded folks instead of alone in a scuzzy dorm room on a tiny cathode ray TV and an exhausted VHS tape.

I know I endlessly beat this drum, but the Music Box has been firing on all cylinders as of late. They’ve slowly pushed back to being a repertoire theater instead of a new-release indie theater, and it’s paid off handsomely for them as practically every older film I’ve attended there has been packed to the ceiling. While that’s not the Music Box I grew up with — they have been around since 1929, and their repertoire period pre-dates the late 90s — I embrace the change. It fills a much-needed absence in the local film scene, and every screening has been a delight.

Corky: “Know what’s the difference between you and me?”

Violet: “…no.”

Corky: “Neither do I.”

WILD THINGS (1998)

In the late 90s, there were two contemporary films I absolutely would not shut up about: Joe Dante’s SMALL SOLDIERS (1998, and there is video footage out there somewhere of me drunkenly ranting about how it should have had at least one Oscar nomination) and John McNaughton’s WILD THINGS (also released in 1998, and I would repeatedly tell people: it’s not the soft-core porn you think it is).

WILD THINGS means different things to different people. Most folks only remember it for the threesome scenes between a never-better Denise Richards, Neve Campbell (always giving it her all), and an amazingly duplicitous Matt Dillon, or they remember Bill Murray’s very sleazy turn as an amoral, neck-braced lawyer, or they remember it because out-of-nowhere, there’s Kevin Bacon’s cock and there’s definitely a romantic subtext to his character and Dillon’s (which, honestly, is basically text — initially that was written in the script).

However, I remember it because it’s a goddamn sun-soaked gonzo neo-noir that is so bat-shit-crazy that the film felt the need to explain itself in the end credits. That’s the memory I took with me when I went to rewatch it at the Music Box Theatre (absolutely killing it this month), with McNaughton in-attendance for a post-film interview with Dmitry Samarov (whose brilliant self-reflective work HACK you should definitely seek out).

Also, both McNaughton and Samarov just happened to be sitting behind me and watched the entire film — not a brag, just a dumb coincidence, as that sort of positioning makes me super-anxious, like when I ended up seated next to Karina Longsworth for her YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS Chicago wintertime screening of OUTRAGE.

I’ll note that: if you’ve been to enough of these sort of ‘director interview’ screenings, it’s rare that the folks involved sit through the entire film. They usually dart off for dinner or drinks and arrive just as the credits roll. I don’t blame them! I’m just shocked when they opt to endure it!

WILD THINGS holds up with aplomb, and also takes on a severely different context today than it did before, while also being a timeless tale. At first it feels very #MeToo, and then it takes a turn, then another turn, then another turn, then it twists, and then again and it will leave you breathless. It is not the film you expect it to be; it’s quintessential noir to its goddamn bones.

In other words: it’s all about sex, power play, and beguilement. Nothing more noir than that, and it all takes place in the humid air of Miami, one of the least noir locations you can think of.

Seeing it in 35mm — McNaughton’s personal print, I’ll add — only made it better. Like most, I first saw it on a well-worn VHS tape from a local rental store as opposed to projected in a theater. It’s that sort of trash — which McNaughton extolls and he specifically told us that that was the intent of the film — but it’s a beautiful alchemy of trash.

While everyone on board knew how brazenly ridiculous the script was, they treated it dead-seriously, and it’s all there on the screen, from the script punch-ups that really give life to the characters, the lush settings, the convoluted narrative, as well as the breezy score, it is trashy perfection.

Stay for the credits, as it’s hand-down, one of the most memorable end-credits sequence ever shot. Marvel could learn a lot from WILD THINGS.

While there are a number of straight-to-video sequels, I have not seen any of them and cannot vouch for them (at this time).

ADDENDUM

I was lucky enough to pick McNaughton’s brain a bit after the screening, particularly about one scene on a boat that I felt riffed on Patricia Highsmith’s THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY (as well as the two best-known film adaptations: THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY (1999) — of course — but also the French adaptation of that Ripley novel: PLEIN SOLEIL).

McNaughton told me: “I love Highsmith, but no, that was never part of it.” So now you know!

DARE ME (2012/2019)

It’s no secret that Megan Abbott is my favorite living author. QUEENPIN was absolutely foundational for me in the current phase of my life. She completely hones in on the physicality, wants and needs of folks, in many expert ways.

With her novel DARE ME, she focuses on cheerleading and bodily control and power.

Granted, I’ve never been a cheerleader, much less a teenage girl, but goddamn — as someone who was a former amateur gymnast — I love to throw myself around and be thrown around. It is absolutely thrilling. My body just wants hands on them, which kind of sucks and has managed to get me into more trouble than I’d like. However, I can’t help it, and there’s power and command that comes with that physicality, and Abbott absolutely nails that facet with DARE ME.

The show she helmed is dreamier and more heightened than even I expected from the source material, but it is glorious however sadly short-lived. It was exquisitely drawn for multiple seasons, but barely survived for one, but what a season.

“In the end, I couldn’t stop it.”

LEOPARD SKIN (2022)

(Peacock) LEOPARD SKIN is an eight episode limited series from Sebastian Gutierrez, perhaps best known for the recent neo-noir series JETT or for the cult comedy ELEKTRA LUXX or a little joke of a film named SNAKES ON A PLANE, depending on the kind of person you are. (I fall in the first camp.)

JETT was known for its supremely hyper-stylized lighting and framing patchwork — segmenting the action to heighten tension as well as to just look cool. As you might imagine, it owes a great deal of debt to Steven Soderbergh’s adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s OUT OF SIGHT with a dash of WILD THINGS. Tellingly, Gutierrez also wrote an episode of the short-lived Karen Sisco spin-off of the film where THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE’s Carla Gugino played Sisco. (It’s worth noting that Gugino and Gutierrez have been entangled for quite some time.)

At first blush, LEOPARD SKIN appears to be a conventional heist-goes-wrong: three ruthless strangers are blackmailed into stealing millions of dollars worth of diamonds by a corrupt judge (an isolated Jeffrey Dean Morgan). They get the diamonds but shit goes sideways, their driver gets shot during the getaway, and they end up at the doorstep of a mansion occupied by an ex (Gugino) and a widow (Gaite Jansen), and the ex just happens to have footage of the widow killing her ex and then blackmails her by requesting that she becomes subservient to her every want.

In other words, it’s all about knowledge, power and sex.

While JETT was dreamlike, LEOPARD SKIN comes across as Lynchian in fashion commercial mode: overly visual and sumptuous, but often also stilted and performative in all the best ways. This is a show that should not exist, and the fact that it’s only available to stream via Peacock is even more mind-boggling, especially since it’s clear that this was not their intended network as the show is not paced for ad-breaks but yet has some of the most disjointed and abrupt ad-breaks, lending an even more surreal atmosphere to the show.

The always-brilliant Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya succinctly stated that “Carla Gugino and Gaite Jansen manage to bring nuance and velocity to a story that doesn’t ever seem to know what it’s doing or why.” LEOPARD SKIN feels groundless but is more interesting for being so. It’s an enigma wrapped in a riddle and is so confounding that you’ll either fall completely in love with it or you’ll find it to be pretentious softcore twaddle. Hopefully, like me, you’ll find it to be the former, but buyer beware.

KILLING PAPARAZZI (2003)

(This was originally penned July 6th, 2021 for a platform other than this website.)

A writer friend recommended Robert M. Eversz’s KILLING PAPARAZZI to me, knowing I have a taste for noir and detective fiction, especially if it’s lurid and moves like a freight train, and KILLING PARAZZI does not disappoint. It’s my favorite neo-noir I’ve read since Megan Abbott’s QUEENPIN — my favorite neo-noir novel ever — one that I found to be a revelation, but that’s a story for another time.

First things first: my friend did not note that this was the second novel in Eversz’s NINA ZERO series, so it took a bit before I could really get a bead on exactly what the protagonist had done to be incarcerated. The events of the first novel are doled out in a trickle, but you eventually get the whole picture (and the following paragraph will help you along without major spoilers, just in case).

KILLING PAPARAZZI features Nina Zero — née Mary Alice Baker — as she’s getting out of prison in the early aughts for killing several men and accidentally blowing up part of LAX. One of the first things she does upon parole? A green card wedding to an unknown Englishman named Gabe. They have a fun night in Vegas, but she realizes she could fall for him and also realizes he could fall for her, so she darts back to her home city, Los Angeles, buys a used Cadillac and a camera, and starts using her streetsmarts to work the paparazzi beat.

A week later, she happens upon the scene of her husband’s murder, floating in LA’s finest drinking water, and finds herself wanting revenge.

It’s pulpy; it’s penned with a clipped terseness that I can’t help but adore; it traffics in L.A. lore; Nina’s an angry misfit, smart, funny, resourceful, and down for more than you might initially expect. It’s absolute catnip for me, and an enthralling read.

FALLEN ANGELS – Murder, Obliquely (S01E05, 1993)

FALLEN ANGELS was a mid-90s neo-noir anthology on SHOWTIME that I only recently heard of, but the fifth episode of the first season, entitled Murder, Obliquely, features Laura Dern, Alan Rickman, Diane Lane, was co-written by Amanda Silver (THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE and a number of the new PLANET OF THE APES films) and directed by Alfonso Cuarón (CHILDREN OF MEN, ROMA). That’s a stellar team right there.

Murder, Obliquely is also based on the Cornell Woolrich short story of the same name. Woolrich wrote the source material for REAR WINDOW among loads of other very successful works, but by others accounts he had a very unhappy life: he married a woman in 1930 while knowing he was gay; the marriage was annulled three years later; despite being a prolific and successful writer, he was also a self-destructive alcoholic, living with his mother in shithole apartments until she died; then he spiraled out completely and became a recluse until he died.

I mention this because this adaptation of Murder, Obliquely very clearly leans into this background, if you read between the lines. (I’ll note that I have yet to read the short it’s based on.) It’s a Sirkian noir of infatuation — Annie (Laura Dern) becomes obsessed with inherited-millionaire Dwight Billings (Alan Rickman) but he can’t get over his ex, the recently-married Bernette Stone (Diane Lane). The story ends with everyone miserable, as noirs do.

Despite having the gauzy veneer of 90s cable television, it’s remarkable stylish with its costuming and art design — especially Dwight’s art deco home — as well as the dialogue, which manages to be distinct without feeling too broad. If you have thirty minutes to spare, it’s a great way to spend some time.

I don’t think anyone will mind a direct link to a fan rip in this case:

THE TURNOUT (2021)

I have not been shy about boosting Megan Abbott over the years; QUEENPIN — her third novel — was a foundational text for me. Upon initially reading it, I asked myself the same question that I’ve asked myself upon consuming other transformative works: “You can get away with this?”

QUEENPIN is a lurid and lusty piece of neo-noir about a smart but young woman who falls in doing accounting work for questionable people, and matters quickly escalate into a very combative piece about two willful women butting heads and committing increasingly terrible acts.

That’s Abbott’s oeuvre in a nutshell. She’s all about the power dynamics of female relationships, appetites, and those who take advantage of the those facets. Perfect material for neo-noir but — as Abbott quickly sussed out — also well-suited for young adult novels, of which she penned a handful of (including the cheerleading YA-noir DARE ME, which she adapted into a canceled too soon USA TV show).

THE TURNOUT is the first book of hers in some time to feature an adult protagonist and players. Granted, it still focuses on extraordinarily physical youth-centric endeavors — this time ballet — and has a number of teen flashbacks, but the endgame here is all about the adults and living with the wreckage of their youth.

It’s a tale of two sisters — Dara, a flinty ice queen, and Marie, mercurial and immature — who run their dead mother’s ballet studio. For years, Dara and Marie and Dara’s husband Charlie, also an ex-dancer who grew up alongside them, lived under their dead parents’ roof. Marie decides to move out, opting to live in the attic of the studio, which used to be their mother’s private space.

A fire breaks out in the studio and they enlist Derek — a smooth-talking contractor — to repair the space while they prepare for their annual NUTCRACKER slate of performances, and matters spiral from there.

Abbott’s prose and internal monologues have traditionally been her strengths, but THE TURNOUT has a lot of repetitive dialogue between characters, a number of redundant explanations, and the plotting also feels a little too neat, a little too exacting.

However, this is still an Abbott book, and those are nitpicks. It is vividly enthralling, with rich and complex characters about an under-examined artistic and physical medium, there’s more than a bit of du Maurier regarding how Abbott treats the dilapidated house and studio, and she definitely sticks the landing. It’s well-worth your time if you’re into off-beat thrillers and personas.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/611535/the-turnout-by-megan-abbott/

DETECTIVE PIKACHU (2019)

(VOD) Now wait, hear me out:

  • It’s a visual marvel that WAS SHOT ON FILM on because Oscar-nominated cinematographer John Mathieson wanted it to look like BLADE RUNNER, and I’d argue that he succeeded
  • It reminds me of Jim Henson’s DOG CITY — a childhood favorite of mine — in that it’s family-friendly noir, but still damn smart. (That said: not nearly as much of a spoof, but very close to one.)
  • It’s darker than you’d expect and has better character development than necessary
  • I have only played POKEMON SNAP and had no proper pre-existing knowledge of the characters or the world and I still loved it
  • It’s worth watching just for the closing reveal
  • I’m short on time today, hence these bullet points

SELAH AND THE SPADES (2020)

(Prime) Tayarisha Poe’s debut SELAH AND THE SPADES can be described as DEAR WHITE PEOPLE meets BRICK and, while I can’t argue with that — it’s full of teens scheming in a neo-noir underworld of their very own making — it’s more than a mashup of those two, partially because it focuses predominantly on girls and power. Also, while it’s Jomo Fray’s first feature as a cinematographer, his experience with short films is wisely executed, providing a strikingly visual film while still keeping a steady hand on SELAH’s framing.

THE KID DETECTIVE (2020)

(Starz/VOD) I have a hard time believing this film wasn’t pitched as ‘gritty adult Encyclopedia Brown’ (and then whomever was being pitched probably replied ‘Encyclo-what?’) but even if it wasn’t, it works as a pretty succinct summary.

As I grew up reading ENCYCLOPEDIA BROWN and TWO-MINUTE MYSTERIES, and love Chandler-esque detective fiction in general, I was already on this film’s side. While it’s much more subdued, quiet, and cynical than I thought it’d be, debut feature writer/director Evan Morgan clearly loves the genre and is surprisingly unwilling to poke fun at it, or even to modernize it. (For a film that takes place in modern day, it’s surprisingly reliant on landline phones.)

While some may be turned off by the dourness of the film — there are cutting remarks and laughs to be had, but the film is soaked in melancholy — it’s a welcome surprise to see a neo-noir that isn’t peppered with flippancy.