sovay: (Rotwang)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2025-05-12 05:18 am

Hey, kid, just sing the songs that wake the dead

It upsets me for many reasons that science in this country is about to crash for a generation if we're lucky, but one more is the news which [personal profile] spatch just sent me that it is now possible to synchrotronically transmute lead into gold so long as you don't mind the gold being a transient and unstable radioisotope. Is there a productive application for this discovery? Do I care? I'd rather it take my tax money than anything advanced by RFK Jr. I like libraries and habeas corpus, too.

To every nimrod who still wants to claim that the women of noir are misogynistically divided between the milksop and the fatale, I commend the enchantingly left-field battle royale climax of Riffraff (1947) in which Anne Jeffreys launches herself like a pro wrestler onto Walter Slezak while Pat O'Brien is still fighting off his goons and then squashes him under a bookcase from which he has to disencumber himself like the victim of a Murphy bed. It's even goofier and braver because Slezak in this film has real menace, a summer-suited stone cold sketch artist who finishes up his latest street scene while his hired muscle is slugging the bejeezus out of O'Brien, whose amiable chiseler of a private eye has a nicely careless chemistry with Jeffreys' canary, herself the kind of platinum-tressed pulp ideal who can pick herself up from getting cold-cocked in someone else's tossed office with breezily tart sang-froid. The opening murder at 30,000 feet is breathtaking in its sharp-shot night rain and silence, but I may still consider the film stolen by Percy Kilbride as the sarcastically milk-tippling cabbie whose jalopy fires up like the 1812 Overture and whose gag of mending O'Brien's shirts runs all the way through a proposal into breach of promise. He's the cherry on this modest but satisfying sundae of RKO B-noir which balances its shortfalls in budget with buckets of style, incidentally the first non-short film I have managed to watch this month. "You got the piano player?"

Speaking of women in noir, the Brattle has announced this year's Noir City Boston and despite the presence of Foster Hirsch, I am not missing Caged (1950) on 35 mm, not to mention I have never seen the directorial debut of Mickey Rooney, My True Story (1951). I reserve the right to throw popcorn if he mischaracterizes any of the dark city dames I know anything about.

chanter1944: a starscape, including a spiral galaxy (on a quest for a jewel)

[personal profile] chanter1944 2025-05-13 12:36 am (UTC)(link)
Gold being a transient and unstable radioisotope - and we thought only the transuranics had a claim to instability... :)
chanter1944: Émilie Agreste, acting in the canon movie Solitude, peeking out from behind a large umbrella (ML - Émilie: camouflage mode)

[personal profile] chanter1944 2025-05-13 02:03 am (UTC)(link)
I... find myself wanting to write this. Oh dear?
chanter1944: the peafowl miraculous, in its active state (ML - peafowl miraculous: magical mystery)

[personal profile] chanter1944 2025-05-13 04:18 am (UTC)(link)
Kyanite: *shifting heel to toe, fast, and throwing off multicolored sparks* Don't give me that look, Copper - what a tale their turbulency tells - come on come on come on! I've owed Lead for ages, and they're hurting him. If you think I'm not jumping out for this, you haven't met me! And you can't honestly stand there and tell me you aren't worried about Gold; try it and I'll call you a liar. Silver! Tell your frenemy to get his head out of his matrix, will you? He's not listening to me and I'm about to portal out. Some things are more important than a low profile, and this is one of them. 'Scuze me!

... Uh. Sorry. I'm not entirely sure where that lot came from!
moon_custafer: neon cat mask (Default)

[personal profile] moon_custafer 2025-05-15 07:30 pm (UTC)(link)
Well if there's any more of it I'll happily read it!