"You have perfection about you. Your eyes hold music. Your heart is the best part of your body. And when you walk every man, woman and child is forced to watch."
Something I like about it. Movies around this time certainly had a certain aim to it. You can see it in Scorsese's After Hours (which is his worst movie ever next to Bringing Out the Dead.) The cinematography seems like it's trying to look like a color noir take on the '40s but that's not really what it is. A color noir take on the '40s looks a lot more like Blade Runner or Dark City.) This is something else. It's more neo-noir which, like I said before, is almost impossible to really describe because if you look at some of the films people have called neo-noir, they're all very different. Most of the old noirs were pretty much uniform in their characteristics. The only thing I can think of is the Western meets urban city. And noirs were alot like Westerns to begin with. So we've basically gone nowhere.
Let's cover the basics. Regular noir is pretty much The Big Sleep or Chinatown. Everything's merely a variation of this. There's a hero, sometimes a antihero or antivillain, with some inner struggles of his own, he's cool and good looking, he falls for the damsel, he tries to get rid of whatever's causing her distress. The lighting is striking cause there's usually hardly any lighting, and the dialog is usually solid and driven by an unapparent rhythm. The biggest leap they can really take is to have no heroes. An example of that would be Double Indemnity. Tech-noir's basically same thing but in the future, with science fiction.
So now there's neo-noir which I've always been fascinated with because I'm still struggling to really see a concrete definition of what it is. After Dark, My Sweet, one of my favorites because I just love Rachel Ward, is commonly cited. It's got the damsel, it's got a "hero" with turmoil, but the very thing that is noir isn't there. And that's darkness. I mean, a frame from After Dark, My Sweet pretty much falls in line with this still:
How can something so bright be considered noir? It's impossible. But that's widely considered as neo-noir. So to me, neo-noir is the western meets noir. Most old noirs never really took place outside of big nests of industrialization unless someone was on the run. So the fact that such a dry and sandy setting like this could be in a movie and still be considered a neo-noir to me, has to be the big factor involved. So to my delight, here's Choose Me. A neo-noir romantic comedy. They never had too much noir-romcoms anyway, so there's a flexible framework we're dealing with. There's certainly a damsel, and a hero, but not much of a villain either. And on top of that, it's not really a romantic comedy. I don't know what this is! It's not serious enough for a drama. So what the hell is it?
There are some movies, where if you someone were to describe it to you, you probably wouldn't normally imagine yourself liking. Punch Drunk Love pretty much fits this description. Other concepts are just too cool not to like. For example, 8 1/2, Synechdoche, New York, and Moon are pretty exciting. To prove my point: Here's a movie about a lonely guy who calls a phone sex line, loses his money, cries out of the blue, but some how gets this girl to fall in love with him. Oh, and at the end he confronts the phone-sex people. That's pretty much the entire movie in a nutshell. Or, here's a movie about a guy who tries to find meaning in his life by building a theater that houses theaters that house theaters and so on. Sounds pretty crazy!
So anyways, I think the same goes here. The story is basically, a girl who's essentially a slut who hates marriage, tries to fall in love with a guy who rushes into marriage, while he is interested in her while being interested in basically every other woman, while some chick answers question the radio. Yeah, that's pretty much it. Everything else probably has nothing to do really do with the story. Oh, and the best part? Teddy Pendergrass is the score. Yeah, that Pendergrass.
It's an odd film. There aren't much romantic comedies that include references to the character's history with the KGB (I'm not counting those spy-action-romantic comedies which, with the exception of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, suck), and it's not even the type of film that tries to be funny. You could usually tell when they try to be funny and aren't. It ends up being pitiful too. But here, they really went for a nice cross between drama and comedy, and then topped it off with some great dialog. It's the comedy you'd smile at, not the comedy you'd laugh at. It's the drama you'll enjoy, but it's not tear-jerking like My Left Foot or anything.
At the standards of a romantic comedy, it's characters are pretty interesting. At the standards of a drama, the way they unravel it all is quite enthralling. You really can't say you expected anything that happens here. It's a nice small movie which is the biggest example of someone not trying to be ambitious. You can't really say they tried to do something here that would have revolutionized cinema to the point that it's unforgettable. At the same time, it's dialog and it's characters somehow manage to make it memorable.
(of all the reviews on here, this probably talks about the actual film, it's characters, and plot the least. it's fitting since the way you see them here is the only way you can really appreciate it.)
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