Noiseless Chatter Archive

Philip’s Note: let me know your thoughts on this one! This is a piece by friend and reader (and film buff) David Savage . I’ll be more than happy to provide a platform for his writing and musings if you enjoy it, so leave a comment and let me know what you think. For now, take it away, David… How does one film encompass a person’s life? Specifically, what approach is best suited? A narrative film is traditionally expected to be two hours long, so a lot of ground in a biopic (biographical picture) will either be skipped, glossed over, or shortened as possible. One example a film will take is combining several characters into one or even eliminating characters. Screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski understand that. Their screenplay for The People vs. Larry Flynt takes the titular character’s two lawyers in real life and combine them into one played by Edward Norton. Bela Lugosi’s wife Hope Lininger, whom he was married to after his recovery to a Demerol addi...

  ALF Reviews: Character Spotlight – Lynn Tanner Lynn. Lovely, lost, unappreciated and underutilized Lynn. When I started this series, I swept her to the side along with every other character on this show. She was nothing, after all. They were  all  nothing. And I wasn’t surprised by that in the least; while I watched  ALF  regularly as a kid, the only thing I remembered of the human characters was that the dad was a shitty actor. Revisiting it in my 30s did nothing to change that, and I didn’t expect it would; I’d watch an episode, write 50,000 words about everything that happened, and would  still  be unable to tell you who the fuck these people were. So I was dismissive of Lynn. Can you blame me? I was convinced that the only character who  was  a character was Kate, and that’s largely because Anne Schedeen was in a position to channel the real-world frustrations felt by every member of the cast. She was convincing because she was  su...

Fiction into Film is a series devoted to page-to-screen adaptations. The process of translating prose to the visual medium is a tricky and only intermittently successful one, but even the fumbles provide a great platform for understanding stories, and why they affect us the way they do. The line separating bravery from idiocy is finer than you might think. The same self-assurance that helps you triumph in the face of insurmountable odds is what causes you to beat your head repeatedly against a brick wall. The same refusal to succumb to tempting lies is what keeps you from accepting uncomfortable truths. The same unrelenting confidence can lead you to glory or damn us all. Kiss Me Deadly is Robert Aldrich’s noir masterpiece, and one that ensured we’d never be able to see the genre the same way again. It was — and is — a knowing study of itself…a loving condemnation of hardboiled detective fiction, while also managing to be one of the screen’s best examples. What’s m...