May 2006 Archives

Brooklyn girl Barbara Stanwyck is a leading lady of film noir great and small, including one of the best, Double Indemnity, as well as several lesser examples of the genre, two of which I saw tonight—you guessed it—at the Film Forum.

Stanwyck always seemed to be smart and flinty, yet constrained by the decidedly less charismatic characters she often played. In Witness to Murder (1954), she’s interior decorator Cheryl Draper, who observes a murder, Rear Window-style, in the apartment across the way, then tries for the film’s remainder to make the police believe it actually happened.

The murderer, Albert Richter (the composed and eloquent George Sanders), speaks exactly like Kelsey Grammer’s Sideshow Bob character in The Simpsons. He’s crafty, too, having hidden the body and evidence, as both he and the unwitting police strive to convince (or in Richter’s case, dupe) Draper into thinking she just dreamed up the whole thing. That a rational person could ever explain this much away is stupid. The lieutenant on the case (Gary Merrill) alternates between reassurances that Draper is merely a hysterical woman and taking her out to dinner. Eventually, Richter gets overly cocky in his mind games and opts for the more direct approach of trying to hurl Draper out her own window. A chase leads them up the winding stair of a clock tower for a confrontation at the top, with some filmwork prefiguring the finale of Vertigo four years later, although not as technically adept.

Crime of Passion starts with Stanwyck in a firecracker role as Kathy Ferguson, a San Francisco advice columnist who tells her women readership to take no guff, sasses back to her boss and tells various men point blank to shut up. Then yet another oddly calm lieutenant, Bill Doyle (Sterling Hayden) moseys into her life and suddenly she’s gooey in love, married and rockin’ the bedsprings with him. (The latter point only implied by some sly dialogue; this was 1957.) All of a sudden, she’s the perfect suburban housewife, fretting over her husband’s social standing among the nattering wives of his coworkers who stop by for canapés and cigarettes, gossiping about who’s been invited to what party and whose husband is getting promoted over whom. And that whole adage about a woman scorned: look out, man. Her conniving ways become increasingly frantic and after an affair calculated to improve her husband’s position at work backfires, she caps the man, a senior cop played by Perry Mason-era Raymond Burr, by shooting him clean through his handsome, raccoon-eyed head. Then she drives home and falls asleep. There’s the Stanwyck I know and love, even though Doyle eventually cracks the case and has to arrest his own wife.

Ah, the mojito: first trendy drink of the 21st century, yet so refreshing I must forgive it its trespasses and have several per sitting. I set off for one today after work, now that summer is official here in the city, with its tidings of vengeful mugginess and steaming garbage odors.

I went to Little Branch, on Seventh Avenue at Leroy Street, which I’d selected earlier as a location convenient to pre- or post-Film Forum drinks. The bar, which opened a year ago, makes a triad of entrepreneur Sasha Petraske’s cocktail kingdom, joining Milk & Honey and The East Side Company. Sasha’s gotten less wankish with each of his speakeasy hideaways: reservations are required at Milk & Honey, with its unlisted phone number and waiting list. The bustling East Side Company features a DJ booth. Little Branch is open to all without reserve. It has a piano, a pressed tin bar at which one may stand, and a dozen or so tiny, intimate booths.

The front door, adjacent an unassuming West Village intersection, is marked only by a small metal plaque. Go down a flight of stairs and you’re there, in the windowless dark under a low corrugated steel ceiling, light from white candles placed on the tables. Scratchy pop hits from Prohibition play in the background. Textures abound: ridged paper napkins, wire-glass tabletops edged in metal, tall wooden seats at the two-person booths upholstered in leather.

And a $12 per drink cost seals the overly trendy deal. I will allow this inflation on occasion. Premium prices are understood on small luxuries in North America’s most expensive city. What irks me more is uninspired restaurateurs profiteering by means of small entrees on large plates, or those deceptively shallow soup bowls. This extends to drinks that appear to contain more ice than liquid, so I was suspicious when my mojito arrived as such, in a glass frosty from the Sno-Cone clump of pea-sized ice pellets rising above the rim.

But the ice style resulted in little melt and an expertly cooled beverage, so the true test was the drink itself. The perfect mojito shouldn’t taste too rum-punchy, nor should it be too sweet. The mouthfeel should be slightly “thick,” from the sugar, yet effervescent, by way of the club soda, a balance Little Branch has achieved. The sugar, the glow of rum, the green snap of the mint, all superchilled by the ice, combined to form near perfect refreshment. I sat there for some time afterwards contentedly crunching my ice. I could have gone for another, but I would have been wiser to have chosen one of the tantalizing specialty drinks containing, say, candied ginger or fresh squeezed fruit juices. Or I could have quizzed the suspendered bartenders’ reportedly encyclopedic knowledge of drinks both popular and archaic. I shall return.

Like Mick, I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes. Also like Mick, I turn my head. The rest of the song I can’t really relate to.

Tonight, I saw Army of Shadows, released in 1969 but never shown in the U.S. until now. It’s getting good word of mouth and reviews—a week ago, Ebert called it the best foreign film this year and added it to his “Great Movies” list. Showings at the Film Forum have been regularly selling out, including tonight’s. And it’s not a bad film for two-and-a-half hours of World War II Résistance Française drama.

There are escapes, ruses and sudden deaths, but this isn’t The Great Escape or even a Chicken Run. The pace is leisurely and the composition of the scenes, chiefly in shadowy interiors and wet winter exteriors, is painterly, all of which amplifies the few scenes of tension.

In one of these, which reminded me of that Hitchcock quote about how difficult it is to kill a man, a trio of resistance members is charged with dispatching a teenaged traitor. They’ve taken an out-of-the-way apartment in which to kill him, but a family has moved in next door and the walls are thin. The basement is connected to the family’s and noise will carry too well in the attic hollow. They don’t have the silencer they wanted for the gun. Should they instead use the gun butt to bludgeon the kid? Instead, should they knife him? Strangle him maybe? They discuss this all the while the traitor stands alone in a corner, listening to their conversation and watching them with fear. It’s one of many grim scenes in a nonetheless engrossing film.

I performed some backtrack subway shenanigans this afternoon to get to the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx. On a map, it’s about a width of Central Park away from my apartment. But I had the Harlem River to contend with.

I took the A down to 145th Street then transferred to the D back uptown. All of the white people except me and one other token guy got off at 161st Street for the Yankees game. Eventually, near the end of the line, I exited at the Fordham Road stop and still had to walk 15 minutes east to the garden. Next time, I’ll try crossing the river on foot via University Heights Bridge, which I now know has a sidewalk.

Central Park is about 3 1/2 times bigger than the comparatively measly 250 acres of the New York Botanical Garden, but I saw a more diverse batch of wildlife than I’ve ever seen in Manhattan. Here is my checklist:

• regular grey squirrels
• freakish jet-black squirrel with brown tail
• rabbits
• chipmunks
• Monarch butterflies
• pigeons (of course)
• mourning dove (heard)
• robin
• worm (eaten by robin)
• a cardinal
• an entire wedding party (getting its photo taken)

I toured a small part of the grounds and didn’t get a chance to check out any of the indoor exhibits. But of what I did see, my favorite plants were these ornamental onions (allium hollandicum) poking out among the hemerocallis in the spruce sector of the Arthur and Janet Ross Conifer Arboretum. They’re tall with rounded heads, spheres of spokes tipped with vibrant puprle blossoms. It’s as if they were designed in wireframe on a computer.

The lawns in the gardens have many “Keep Off the Grass” signs, but this is more of a place for looking as opposed to the lazing and tromping you get on your average Central Park greenery. So the mood is sedate, the only bustle from slow-moving tour groups of old people. There are peaceful nooks on winding paths where I could pause to watch a stream or take a seat. One crafty arrangement I came across was a long and curved, 15-foot-tall hedge that had ground-level fireplace-sized chunks cut into it at regular intervals; secreted into each leafy alcove was a park bench.

After watching X-Men: The Last Stand tonight, Jimi, his crew and I tromped over to Spanky’s BBQ for dinner, a spot owned by the Heartland Brewery and heavily promoted by them via outdoor ad signage throughout the city.

My half-rack order of St. Louis-style pork ribs was salty and of the “dry-rub” variety, a la that other Times Square BBQ hotspot, Virgil’s. I like ’em saucy, so they weren’t much to my liking. The atmosphere smacked of TGI Friday’s and the soundtrack of ’90s college pop-rock gave me flashbacks, and not the good kind. Also, Spanky seems keen to blacken all of his meat; like my ribs, Mike’s chicken was scabbed over with carbon. Oh, and overpriced.

All was not lost; for no discernable reason (though perhaps because we were one of the sole groups among the scattering of patrons in the cavernous dining room), the bartender had a round of his specialty cosmos sent over to our table, then followed it up with a complementary round of shots.

Spanky’s BBQ

• 127 W. 43rd St.
• (212) 575-5848
• Meal 20 of 52: half-rack of ribs (with one side and a corn bread muffin) ($14.95) and a can of PBR ($2.50).

Being the weekend of Fleet Week, the sidewalks surrounding Times Square tonight were dotted with sailors in crisp white uniforms and a larger-than-usual number of prostitutes. But I was there to see X-Men: The Last Stand at the AMC Empire 25 on 42nd Street with Jimi and Company.

It’s another throwaway big-budget actionriffic extravaganza, but the earlier battle scenes don’t match the intensity of the final confrontation pitting bad mutants vs. good mutants + humans. I won’t give anything away but it’s got a lot of pithy maneuvers and lines of dialogue that made many members of the audience lunge forward in their seats and shout out in glee, drowning out entire lines of the dialogue that followed.

There many key mutant deaths in this film, which makes it the grimmest of the three films now in the franchise. It also has the weightiest message, with a plot of a “cure” for “mutant behavior” apparently alluding to “homosexuality.” Finally, this installment contains the most non-celebrity mutants nobody cares about, all of whom seemed to be dressed as extras for a Michael Jackson video and none of whom taxed either the scriptwriters’ imagination nor the film’s special effects budget.

I wish I would have not read those reviews that revealed a bunch of the fun bits. More of the usual superhero shenanigans from the gang, including Halle Berry, who must have threatened to beat the producers with her Oscar until they agreed to give her more screen time. She still can’t act.

If you see the film, make sure you sit all the way through the credits. There’s a brief scene planted at the very end that plays off on a throwaway detail from earlier in the film. It caused the few nerds left in the theater to nearly wet themselves with glee.

So I was standing outside the Film Forum, looking at the schedule posted there and deciding whether I wanted to see yet another B Noir or L’Armée des Ombres (Army of Shadows), when out of nowhere this cute girl asks what I’m planning to see and starts talking with me about how she saw Army and thought it was great. Blah, blah; we talked about movies. Then she told me she bought a necklace today and pulled it out of her bag to show me. It was beads interspersed with what appeared to be large Chiclets speckled with glitter, and she held it up to my neck and said it’d look good with the shirt I was wearing.

At this point, Necklacegirl’s friend, who was inside the theater buying tickets, came out and started talking to me about the movie they were going to see, Stagedoor, and that she had briefly been a child actor. I told her I worked on the floor above an audition studio on Eighth Avenue and she said she knew the place. I couldn’t think of anything else to say so I said, “What’d you do, cereal commercials?” Coincidentally, that’s exactly what she did, one in 1989 for Breakfast With Barbie, a limited edition Ralston Purina cereal that she said tasted like sickly sweet cotton candy. She had to cheerfully ladle many spoonfuls of it into her mouth, but spit it into a bucket as soon as the camera stopped rolling. She also appeared in a Six Flags commercial when she was 14 but looked 10, and Necklacegirl cheerfully interjected, to Cerealgirl’s apparent embarrassment, that the ad still runs occasionally.

So were these young ladies just being friendly like, or were they hitting on me, or what? I was wearing my nice pants, the ones that several of my female coworkers have complimented, so perhaps that was it. But maybe they were grifters; having seen all this noir lately, I’m suspicious of loose women. I would have offered to see the same movie they were, in order to gather more information, but I wasn’t interested in showtunes and hyperkinetic pint-sized fabulousness. I think I need a contingency plan if this ever happens again.

Also, I should have opted for Army because the B-Noir I saw, Trapped, was the pits. Counterfeiter Lloyd Bridges (Jeff’s dad) breaks free from federal custody and tries to track down his ex-partners, who have been profiting from his operation since he was jailed seven years ago. Along the way, he unwittingly leads the feds to close in on the racket. Barbara Payton plays the dame while John Hoyt channels Alan Arkin as the secret service agent undercover as the high-stakes gambler who gains Bridges’ confidence.

It’s a snoozer with robotic line readings and some of the worst fake fighting and reaction-takes I’ve ever seen, even accounting for the stagy conventions of most films made before the 1970s. The best line is a throwaway at the beginning by a bank teller to a flustered merchant, who has tried to deposit a $20 bill unknowingly accepted as counterfeit. The teller explains some of the fake’s imperfections, chiding, “You’ve got to look for these things in a bill of this size.” See, the movie was made in 1949, when $20 was a lot of money. Ha ha!

It’s true Hollywood magic—meaning never would it happen in real life—to have Kim Novak mashing lips with Fred MacMurray, as they do frequently in Pushover, which I saw tonight, another installment in Film Forum’s “B-Noir” series.

Even less likely is their meet cute, as he rescues her from her stalled car, then gives her another hand, as it were, on his couch. (He: “Your place or mine?” She: “Surprise me.”)

It is not possible to even glance at Novak with chaste thoughts, with her flawless features, oft-parted lips, and as in Vertigo, a bra-begone philosophy to getting dressed. Carnal, said Truffaut, and he was exactly right. MacMurray’s redeeming qualities, on the other hand, are limited to thick, oddly angled eyebrows, lumpy chin and ’50s suburban blandness. He’s like a high school math teacher. I kept thinking, “Watch your step, buddy. That dame’ll double-cross ya first chance she gets.”

But here in her first speaking role, Novak is mostly eye candy as a bank robber’s girlfriend who sticks with MacMurray against reason until the inevitably bloody end. She’s the subject of a stakeout by him and his honest partner (Philip Carey), glimpsed by them through binoculars from an apartment window across the way. MacMurray gets involved with her on the sly, hatching a plan to make off with her boyfriend’s stolen loot. It’s thrilling to watch MacMurray’s lies, fake alibis and body count sink him deeper into trouble. The film’s a cross between Double Indemnity, a noir that also involves MacMurray and greedy schemes gone awry, and Rear Window, with its voyeuristic snooping.

Of the two halves of tonight’s double feature, I thought I’d enjoy Pushover more because it featured familiar actors. But I liked the other film better.

Having seen many installments now in the “B-Noir” series, I’ve decided my favorite element of the genre is the archetype of the strong and saucy woman. Sure, tomatoes like Novak are fun to ogle, but they’re boring. Better are the hard-bitten, curt and fiercely independent ladies (or at least until an inevitable sappy ending), like Ann Sheridan, who fires off zingers left and right in Woman on the Run. She spends most of the film evading the San Francisco cops and cracking wise with them. They suspect she’ll eventually locate her near-estranged husband (Ross Elliott), who’s on the run himself since witnessing a gangland murder that opens the film. A newspaperman (Dennis O’Keefe) gains her confidence and tags along to help in the hunt so he can get a scoop-worthy story from the husband. Sheridan’s character unfolds gradually to realize that she doesn’t know anything about her husband and that she still has feelings for him. Unfortunately, the ending is a cheesy, stretched-thin set piece in a waterfront amusement park, with Sheridan breaking character and getting all fretful, on a hurtling roller coaster, no less.

Even more jarring than any sudden plot developments was this guy sitting in the row in front of me, one of these sweaty, overweight, middle-aged loner types clad in a too-snug short-sleeve knit shirt from the ’70s, who ate a procession of individually wrapped foodstuffs from his plastic grocery bag. He kept rooting around in there like it contained buried treasure, producing prolonged noises of polyethylene rustling, cellophane crinkling, then mouth-smacking, prompting people to hiss at him to shut the fuck up.

It may surprise you to learn that there are more inconsiderate jerks in the average Film Forum audience than at the megaplexes I’ve been frequenting lately, and Film Forum is supposed to attract all the smugly overeducated, politically conscious, Village Voice-reading types. When Katie and I were there on Sunday, we witnessed a literal screaming argument between the double-feature involving some white guy who apparently told a chatty Asian woman during the film to be quiet, which she felt was racist. As their debate reached a fevered pitch, we gathered in a loose circle to bask in the hysteria, yet kept our distance and our postures catlike in case gunfire broke out and we needed to dive under the seats.

The audience for the performance tonight of Stomp at the Orpheum Theater in the East Village was treated to a commercial, billed as the first before a theatrical event in the U.S.

True to the venue, it was a live pitch, and the audience clapped when told they’d be watching, in essence, a one-act ad. It was for the “Visit London” campaign and consisted of a conversation between a mother and daughter, as well as a married couple, who namedropped limey tourist attractions. This was followed by, The New York Times noted dryly, a disembodied voice chiming, “Whatever you like doing, you’ll love doing it in London.”

Whether any of this was digested is uncertain; the Times reported the audience’s pre-show chatter continued on through the commercial, just like during the 20 minutes of slides, commercials and trailers (which are commercials for movies) before the typical film shown in Manhattan.

So the video/live-action admen now have us hooked on multiple fronts. There’s still TV, of course, and they’re working overtime to make sure we can’t TiVo them out of existence. They’re making new strides online; Google announced Tuesday that it is rolling out click-to-play “video ads,” which in the olden days were called “commercials.” They’ve still got us snared in most airports, and on airplanes with TVs. Not to mention at the movies, and now at the theater.

And where should I read this Stomp story initially, but on a tiny television screen mounted in an elevator in my office’s building, which handily displays a weather forecast and breaking news items, but is also rife with conflicting pitches for online poker and money management firms.

Earlier this year, the editor of The New York Times Book Review polled several hundred authors, critics and other literary types, asking them to identify “the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years.”

They decided on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, but writers being writers, they first quibbled over every word of the question. By “American,” did the Review mean written by one or merely concerning the nation? What is original “fiction” in these dark days of Frey and Viswanathan? Amusingly, even “25 years” was scrutinized: what about, say, A Confederacy of Dunces, written in the ’60s and surely a product of that decade, but not published until the early ’80s?

But most pressingly, what is “best”? According to A.O. Scott, who formulated his commentary after reviewing the tally of votes, they are the books “that assume a burden of cultural importance.”

They attempt not just the exploration of particular imaginary people and places, but also the illumination of epochs, communities, of the nation itself. America is not only their setting, but also their subject.

Beloved fits this bill with its story of the African American post-slavery experience, but that’s not reason alone to make it “best.” Scott offhandedly defines a “classic,” a category “best” books would fit into, as one that has become “a staple of the college literary curriculum,” as Beloved did swiftly after its publication in 1987. As I wrote recently about what makes a photograph iconic, the arbiters of artistic taste are largely nameless: the curators, critics, dealers, auctioneers and teachers. Along with White Noise, The Crying of Lot 49 and Time’s Arrow, Beloved was one of the centerpiece works of discussion in my postmodern lit class in college, taught a mere five years after its publication by a passionate man named Zackel who resembled Bob Hoskins.

At any rate, I think Beloved also works because it functions on multiple levels. You can put down your CliffsNotes and read it just as a romance-drama or as an American Gothic ghost story, and it’s still a good read. It may have won the Pulitzer for its importance, but it’s still a perennially popular seller, if I’m not mistaken.

Perhaps paradoxically, Scott suggests, if I’m understanding him correctly, the best books are consciously written to be “important.” Scott agrees Ann Beattie, for example, “is among the most gifted and prolific fiction writers of her generation”

but her books are nowhere to be found on this list; not, I would venture, because she fails to live up to the survey’s implicit criterion of importance, but because she steadfastly refuses to try.

But the rare book can still be as “important” as it is publicly popular and accessible, and there in a nutshell you have a great literary work, one with lasting power that I can still throw in my bag to read on the subway.

A simple, tightstrung drama taking place mostly on a train ride from Chicago to Los Angeles, The Narrow Margin didn’t have a big budget or name-brand talent, even by 1952 standards, but it’s an engrossing noir thriller backed by crackly Oscar-nominated writing.

I couldn’t help but think afterwards that if the same film had only starred A-list actors, it’d be better known today, instead of bearing the could-be-worse consensus “best of the B-noirs.” Katie and I popped over to the Film Forum tonight to catch it, another installment in the movie house’s excellent six-week series of gritty, second-billed mysteries and crime dramas spanning the mid-’40s to the mid-’50s.

Charles McGraw plays the overworked, underpaid flatfoot Walter Brown with jangled nerves and a voice of grimness and gravel. He’s charged with protecting and transporting one Mrs. Frankie Neall, a take-no-guff moll who has switched sides and is on her way to a trial at which she’ll name names in her slain husband’s operation. “She’s a 60-cent special,” rumbles Brown. “Cheap, flashy, and strictly poison under the gravy.” About the actress who plays her, Marie Windsor, Katie and I independently had the same thought: she’s a ringer in style, sass and substance for Allison Janney of The West Wing fame. See for yourself:

Director Richard Fleischer makes best use of suspense and action within the train’s close quarters, while flooding scenes with the harsh light and dark shadow of A-list noir. He steadily introduces aboard a series of mugs disguised as businessmen who have been hired to put the hit on Neall without arousing suspicion and maybe bump off Brown while they’re at it. Seemingly peripheral characters are folded into the mystery, all of whom Brown is initially loathe to trust. One is a comely mother (Jacqueline White) whom Brown takes a shine to as he fends off her mischievous, untrusting young son. Another is a mysterious overweight fellow, played by Paul Maxey, who admits, “Nobody loves a fat man, except his grocer and his tailor,” as passengers try to shy past him in the train’s narrow passageways. Clever twists culminate in a final act cunning enough that even the New York Times critic of the day kept as mum as an M. Night Shyamalan reviewer, admitting “to elaborate here would be to ruin an ingratiating swindle.”

Man, butter beans: habas grandes. I must start making chili with these. They’re like albino lima beans, only tasty. They make a pretty good soup, too. Moosewood writes that the inspiration for this recipe is a white chili, but it’s closer in texture and taste to a cheese soup that happens to be spicy. Not too bad.

Do you know who was sitting directly behind me tonight at The Da Vinci Code? Elizabeth Berkley. Or so I was told by a couple of excitable gay gentlemen in my party. I don’t like turning around to stare at celebrities in movie theaters any more than I like turning around to stare at people such as yourself in movie theaters, so I faced forward, watching the pre-movie commercials for cars and soda, but remained amused as the gentlemen stole glances and tried not to whisper the word Showgirls too loudly.

That was fun, but as for The Da Vinci Code, it stars Tom Hanks as an expert of anagrams and concerned looks. He would beat you at Big Boggle every time, but he would derive no discernable pleasure from it. Audrey Tautou plays a French hottie with fabulous legs who tags alongside Tom and asks questions (“I don’t understand,” “What does it mean?”, “Is it an anagram?”) that serve only to expel chunks of expository dialogue.

In any other Hollywood production, Audrey would become Tom’s love interest, but The Da Vinci Code is too emotionless for that. The closest we get is Audrey tenderly massaging Tom’s large head to exorcize his childhood trauma of falling into a well, which like every other main character’s backstory, we get to watch in a bleached flashback.

Since I’m only going to be making more fun of this movie, I should point out now that I haven’t read the book. This article convinced me not to. I don’t know how many of Dan Brown’s ham-fisted sentences made it through the studio meat grinder intact, but there are plenty of clichés left in the script, like “You are in grave danger” and many others I couldn’t be bothered to remember or write down. There are also clumsy sixth-grade reading-level nudges (“Sub rosa. Literally, ‘under the rose.’”) and repeated subtitling of obscure French exclamations like oui and merde.

The plot is basic and linear. Tom and Audrey flit around France and England on a Nancy Drew-style treasure hunt to solve the murder of Audrey’s grandfather, a curator at the Louvre. They find relics that should have rightly disintegrated or been found and sold on eBay many years prior. And thank goodness all those French clues are written in plain English.

Ian McKellen’s eccentric character injects some much needed energy halfway into the film, but by the time the fruity old Brit pops up with tea and glee, I was feeling drowsy, and although Elizabeth Berkley may not have been sleeping per se, she was very quiet. I realized too that although Sir Ian plays an over-the-top character that adds a spark of fun and revitalizes Tom and Audrey, he’s talking the same style nonsense as everyone else, about finding secrets hidden in B-list Bible gospels and da Vinci’s The Last Supper. I hear that in a deleted scene on The Da Vinci Code DVD, Ian will demonstrate how you can fold a $20 bill to discover hidden pictures of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks!

The whole Bible-busting backstory of Mary Magdalene bearing Jesus’ child, the search for the Holy Grail and secret societies of self-flagellating men who speak Latin on cell phones is preposterous, or no more plausable than many other tenets of religion offered as fact. I’d hope the Louvre would be more up in arms over this movie than religious zealots, if not only because now visitors will think they can snatch Caravaggios from the walls without immediately drawing armed guards or an embittered Jean Reno. Plus the museum will likely get even longer lines for the Mona Lisa and slack-jawed questions about where that painting is with the key hidden behind it.

There’s no one quite like Sterling Hayden. My only previous knowledge of him was getting shot in the neck by Al Pacino in The Godfather and as the general concerned about “precious bodily fluids” in Dr. Strangelove.

In Crime Wave, which I saw last night as part of Film Forum’s series of “B Noir” films chiefly from the bottom of the bill in the ’50s, he’s the impassive Detective Sims, on the trail of an ex-con and his wife who he wrongly thinks are involved with a gang of cop-killing criminals. As it should be in the best noir, it’s a varied bunch of thugs with memorable mugs, including a 33-year-old Charles Bronson as the lunkhead muscle of the group.

Sims is always wearing a too-short necktie that’s inevitably flopped around backwards, and boasts a twisted scowl into which he sticks an endless succession of cigarette-substitute toothpicks, plucked from the breast pocket of his tweed suitcoat. The film makes no bones about the fact Hayen was 6'5", showing him towering over the other characters in the film.

He’s shrewd and unflappable as his case plays out, and although he’s not emotional outright, you suspect something vile is simmering under his lowered hat and behind his unblinking, ink-black eyes. Hayden’s been described as sadistic in this film, dogging the ex-con and his wife, saying he knows of their guilt (they’re actually being blackmailed by the criminals), but his actions border more closely on manic relentlessness, like Ahab and that whale.

The end is a surprise as he lets the ex-con and his wife free in thanks for their aid in foiling a bank robbery planned and nearly executed by the criminals. There’s a nervous relief at the film’s end as Sims leans against a building to pause finally for a job well done. He pulls a bent cigarette from his pocket with surprise, lights it and takes a drag, then winces and throws it to the ground, screwing a toothpick back into his mouth while squeezing out a smile.

When the Senate voted today to add 370 miles of fencing to the U.S./Mexico border, the presenter of the amendment, Senator Jeff Sessions, explained that “Good fences make good neighbors.” Apparently as clarification, he added, “Fences don’t make bad neighbors.”

The first part of Sessions’ statement is of course from Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall,” the misinterpretation of which I’ve written about before. See, the narrator of that poem is quoting his next-door neighbor, who insists on rebuilding the mortarless stone wall between their properties each spring, when the thaw knocks rocks out of place. Why is the wall necessary? Why do fences make good neighbors, and what the hell does that even mean, the narrator wonders, adding:

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.

I question the effectiveness of extending physical barriers to crack down on illegal immigration. And although it’s clear what we want to wall out, perhaps we need to look more closely at what we may be walling in. At any rate, I’d like our elected officials to keep the argument Frost-free, unless they mean to suggest America is isolationist, driven by habit like an “old-stone savage” that “moves in darkness,” and not one to wonder why borders and boundaries were ever necessary to begin with.

There is additional internet network-naming nerdery going on within wi-fi distance of my home computer, referencing the four-armed Hindu god of wisdom. I’m Argo, as you will recall.

I thought I’d never eaten tapas before, but I was wrong; upon close inspection, it turns out they’re actually appetizers. I’ll stop there because I’m sure Seinfeld wrung any unfunny humor from this foodstuff back when it first became popular in 1992 or so.

The tapas in question were delicious and eaten at La Paella during a dinner commemorating The Man’s birthday and featuring him and his mom, Jimi, Lee-Ann, Mike and myself. This photo shows, from left, Jimi, the Man and his Mom.

Some of the table also got paella and although I passed because I had gorged on a medley of fillet, chicken and vegetarian tapas, it was an oceanic bounty, including those jumbo shrimp that still have their eye stalks attached.

We drank sangria and for dessert, it was flan aplenty and some warm chocolate cake. Because the waiters weren’t up to it, we all sang “Happy Birthday.”

Afterwards, the kids took the subway uptown from Eighth Street before we went our separate ways. We joshed around while waiting for our train and if a production executive from NBC Entertainment would have happened by and overheard our banter, he would have optioned our act immediately as a mid-season replacement for whatever sitcom is starring John Lithgow. We’re like Friends meets a United Colors of Benetton ad, plus sexual innuendo, vicious racial slurs and “yo mama” jokes.

La Paella

• 214 E. 9th St. (between Second and Third Avenues)
• (212) 598-4321
• Meal 19 of 52: lots of tapas, sangria and flan that Jimi graciously paid for, unless I owe him money and don’t know it.

Not everyone loves Frank Gehry. The architect’s most recent project is an unenviable task: forming the skyline of Brooklyn. On Friday, with developer Forest City Ratner, Gehry unveiled his model of the borough’s Atlantic Yards Project, a 22-acre plot of glass, brick and metal skyscrapers that would poke up over historic, low-rise neighborhoods, the residents of which aren’t universally happy.

Opponents say he’s painting a gloss over ’60s-style urban renewal and have demanded he alter the density and size of his project. Although the developer has committed to contract the plan by about five percent, Gerhy said Friday that he had been “paring back” the design himself. “It is a process,” he added elusively, according to The New York Times.

This process is a strange one, although you can glimpse it in Sydney Pollack’s new documentary, Sketches of Frank Gehry, which I saw this afternoon.

And begin with a sketch it does, loping and loose, like a drunken scrawl on a cocktail party napkin. Models are next. Gehry can’t or won’t use computers, and instead we see him as the film opens, paunchy, white-haired and plain-spoken, seated at a table with a pair of Fiskars scissors, Scotch tape and sheets of thin, silvery cardboard. He has half a model before him, and he cuts, folds and places panels here and there, moving some, adding others, cutting holes. He contemplates and fiddles some more.

“It’s so stupid looking, it’s great,” he says, suggesting later he’s not fully satisfied unless he’s tweaking something. Touring one of his own creations soon after its completion, he says wryly, “By the time I get to the finished building, I don’t like it.”

Gehry is defined several times as an artist or an artist-architect, with the baggage the name may imply: ego, form over function, a drive to perfection, the creation of beauty.

At an early age, Gehry is praised for his masterful sketches and later takes a ceramics class that foreshadows his architectural career; in his statement for the 1980 edition of “Contemporary Architects,” Gehry writes that he approaches each building

as a sculptural object, a spatial container, a space with light and air, a response to context and appropriateness of feeling and spirit. To this container, this sculpture, the user brings his baggage, his program, and interacts with it to accommodate his needs. If he can’t do that, I’ve failed.

Perhaps his first great project is his own house, a container within a container. Gehry is told the pedestrian Los Angeles bungalow he buys in the late ’70s is haunted, and he decides by “the ghosts of Cubism” as he builds an angular shell completely encompassing the original structure. He pays tribute to artist-contemporaries he admires—Johns and Rauschenberg—by using industrial materials out of context, such as chain link fencing and corrugated sheet steel. A shot of Gehry’s kitchen shows its rear wall is the front of the original house, siding and windows intact. Shaving one morning in an upstairs bathroom, he becomes disgruntled by a lack of natural light and punches a hole in the roof with a hammer to let in the sunlight.

After his alterations are more or less complete, the president of a local real estate firm visits Gehry at the house and is flabbergasted the architect would live there but take comparatively pedestrian commissions. Gehry changes his ways of working to be self-reflective and since then has brought well-monied clients and the public his curves and unusual angles, uncommon materials and most famously, his sprawling, undulating roofs and panels of metal.

A fascinating segment of the film occurs when Gehry discusses the unobvious entwining of art with his work. Pulling from an office wall a color laser print of Hieronymus Bosch’s 500-year-old painting Christ Crowned with Thorns, Gehry shows that the shape, position and contrast of its central characters directly influenced the floor plan of the Jerusalem Museum of Tolerance, Center for Human Dignity, in Israel.

Just as art informs his architecture, Gehry’s high-powered clients describe his buildings in unarchitectural terms. Ex-Disney chief Michael Eisner doesn’t hesitate to compare the roof of a Gehry hockey arena in Los Angeles to breasts, while Barry Diller speaks of panels from a project he commissioned as boat sails. Gehry himself has defined a centerpiece element of his Brooklyn project as a bride’s veils. When Pollack asks him if he thinks of the surfaces of his structures as “painterly,” Gehry disagrees. Pollack proves him wrong with a montage of Gehry surfaces absorbing and reflecting light, sky, earth and water, resembling materials unlike themselves: iridescent fish scales or a copper desert floor at sunset.

Only one detractor gets significant air time and offers the instance of Gehry’s most famous work, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, as an example of architecture overwhelming art. The artist Julian Schnabel, surely having some fun clad in a white terry cloth robe and shades as he sips a brandy and dangles a cigarette from his other hand, counters that if Gehry’s surroundings are said to devour art, maybe that art’s just not good enough.

Praise is lavished thickly in Sketches of Frank Gehry, not much time is devoted to any one project and physical failures of Gehry’s work are completely ignored; there was a well-publicized problem, for instance, with the roof of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, which until it was sanded, blinded people on sunny days and heated adjacent sidewalks to 140°. But the film works well as a talk between two old friends, interspersed with bits of the architect’s history, personality, drive and creative process.

So fresh and so green, this soup is like an earthy, leafy embrace from the Jolly Green Giant himself. It’d likely be even springier had I sprung for homemade stock, but that’d have me rolling around on the floor from the sheer deliciousness.

All the vegetables I used were fresh except the peas, which were frozen. For my shredded greens I used a cup each of spinach and beet greens.

I couldn’t find ground fennel at various grocers, then remembered the Braun coffee grinder I’ve held onto even though I’ve been using Eight O’Clock pre-ground coffee for the past two years. After I cleaned out the coffee gunk with a clean toothbrush, the Braun ground the seeds in a snap. I wondered if this licoricey ingredient would overpower the recipe, but its taste falls back, blends in and lets the greenery holla. This is a perfect soup for a day like today: birds chirping, sunny, 65 degrees and breezy.

Lest you think the very definition of minestrone has been bastardized by the lack of any pasta in this recipe, I can assure you cannellini beans are the next best thing. They’re pasta-colored, pasta-bland and more nutritious. I didn’t miss anything and the Parmesan I liberally sprinkled atop had my brain convinced there was pasta lurking in there somewhere. In fact, a cursory Google shows there are many popular minestrone recipes without pasta.

As for substitutions, I may have made one: is zucchini the same as “green squash”? It sure looked like zucchini. Tasted like it, too.

As long as the vegetables are in season, I’d make this recipe again. If I were making a dinner of it, I’d serve it as an appetizer or first course before a pasta dish. Then the party would move to the veranda for sorbet, cappuccino, witty banter, charades, and after the second jug of Chianti, strip Scrabble.

What was I thinking?

No, wait; what were the makers of Poseidon thinking?

Dialogue tainted by every cliché in the book. Typecast characters I didn’t care about, including a jerk nicknamed Lucky who dies and a screechy child who regrettably survives, although not without constantly wandering off to become imperiled. Ultra-linear, by-the-book plot. Kurt Russell looking and acting like he just finished scarfing down an entire uncooked meatloaf.

Some of the special effects are moderately absorbing, but nothing that hasn’t been already gaped at in Titanic nearly a decade ago.

And there’s trouble in the cards, Poseidon people, if your movie packs the opening-day 8:05 p.m. show in Manhattan only half full. There were more people lined up across the street to see Guns N’ Roses at the Hammerstein.

For a nation obsessed with sex, only one grouping of the six pronouns in the English language identifies gender: it/she/he.

A problem with these third-person singular pronouns arises when you need to use one of them to refer back to an indefinite pronoun such as anyone, everybody, everyone, no one or someone. Are those words male or female? They could be one or the other or both, so the issue gets sidestepped and you hear or read sentences like:

Everyone knows they shouldn’t pet a sleeping crocodile.

Does that look correct to you? Yes? Well, slow down there, chief. According to tightly puckered sources like the The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, because everyone is singular, it requires the singular he or she:

Everyone knows he shouldn’t pet a sleeping crocodile.

The Times brings up a good point about not using a plural pronoun with a singular antecedent; strictly speaking, if that “Everyone knows they” sentence is correct, then so is this glue-sniffing Gollum construction:

As I write my blog, we cry sometimes.

Yet it’s not as easy a fix as the Gray Lady suggests. “What about me?” a woman may rightly ask. “I’m smart enough to let sleeping crocodiles lie!” It’s this cry that birthed the following construction, one “solution” to this debate that everyone agrees sucks:

Everyone knows he or she shouldn’t pet a sleeping crocodile.

It has the potential to worsen the longer the sentence gets:

Everyone knows he or she shouldn’t pet a sleeping crocodile because he or she could get his or her hand snapped clean off.

So what to do? On the far right, we have the possibly sexist but more likely ultra-parental it’s-correct-because-we-say-so solution of The New York Times. Remember too that this is a publication that continues to insist on printing “courtesy” titles with surnames after first references: “Ms. Goodall insisted chimpanzees are her specialty and could not offer advice on petting sleeping crocodiles.”

On the far left, we have folks like Richard Lederer, a learned and respected linguist who nonetheless appears on his website wearing a tuxedo and a jester’s hat. He would have no problem with that first crocodile sentence, arguing that we’ve been using the singular-pronoun-plus-they construction since at least Chaucer. And because most everyone still speaks that way, he adds, it’s grammatically correct.

This stance ignores some facts. In Chaucer’s day, there weren’t even commonly accepted rules for spelling much less grammar. Also, as you may have noticed, even people as important as our president seem to have a weak grasp of the English language. Perhaps we the people shouldn’t be considered automatic arbiters or experts of what’s grammatically correct.

A workaround suggested almost as an afterthought by both the Times and Lederer camps is my preferred way to resolve this problem: reword the sentence, you lazy bastard. In general, why not one of these:

Don’t pet sleeping crocodiles.
It’s unwise to pet sleeping crocodiles.
Everyone knows not to pet sleeping crocodiles.

Rewording doesn’t work in all cases, but I can live with that as long as I’m still doing my part to help prevent senseless lady-offendings and crocodile maulings.

I’m not sure this roller coaster has the same value in Spanish that it would in English. Moreover, I think that people who want to be a citizen of this country ought to only ride English-language roller coasters.

There was a bum who was literally urine-soaked, slumped unconscious or asleep on the express train this morning, which made me think of that old New York adage, “Better a urine-soaked bum than one who smells like a dog that's rolled around in its own poo.”

The air conditioning in the car was rumbling full blast, so the odor wasn't too pungent, but it was funny watching commuters stride confidently aboard the half-empty car at 72nd Street and Times Square, then suddenly realize why it was half-empty, as they scritched up their noses and scanned the crowd with a frown to see who was responsible for the olfactory malfeasance.

A passenger sitting near where I was standing had his handkerchief clutched to his face, and there was like a six-foot danger zone radiating from the bum's perch that was wordlessly deemed too smelly and off limits.

I exhausted the free soup recipes I wanted to try from the Moosewood website, so I broke down and bought one of their cookbooks. They have many, but not one specifically for soups, so I settled for Moosewood Restaurant Daily Special, which was billed as including recipes for “soups, stews, salads and extras.” If you like mostly vegetarian soups, I can recommend it: a bit less than half the book is soup recipes. It breaks down to include 40 bean and grain soups, 32 vegetable soups, 24 creamy dairy soups, 20 chilled soups, 11 seafood soups and six recipes for stock.

One of Moosewood’s strong points is exotic and intriguing spice combinations, so I decided on the Indian Roasted Eggplant Soup, which included several spices I had to buy that will likely sit in my cupboard never to be used again. After half a dozen stores, I gave up on finding black mustard seeds and just bought the regular yellow ones. And, boy, they really do pop when you cook them in an oiled skillet, in my case, all over the stovetop like a miniature, tightly contained hailstorm.

It was pretty tasty although a chore to prepare the vegetables, particularly the de-skinning; those peppers are stubborn. I’d maybe make this again if it was for an Indian-themed dinner spread, but if I must make another creamy soup, I’ll just stick with that potato-cheese one I really liked. Much easier and just as savory despite the fact that it doesn’t include any spices other than dill. I’ve decided that in general, I like my soups to have more varied textures, with ingredients identifiable by eye.

Transit Warbler. Entranced by the shininess of “spare” change, this lesser warbler can be found making its discordant song on street corners, in the deepest recesses of subway stations, and sometimes within the harsh environs of the subway itself. Thrives on attention and aforementioned coinage.

Jaywalk. This common but surefooted specimen is known for taking the fastest route to its destination in disregard of cross-migrating traffic. Often unaware of its own surroundings, it is neither flappable nor easily approached due to its speedy resolve.

Hawker. Known to proffer all manner of shoddy objects in exchange for the paper money it uses to build its nest. Feeds on the gullible. Rife on Canal Street and Times Square year-round, but generally prevalent wherever tourists may flock. Responsive to a clear-throated haggle-call or police raid.

Prix Fixe. This French native makes its home in the cafés and bistros below 14th street. Usually spotted during brunch and early dinner, its appearance in balmy weather is heralded by cheerful notices chalked on slate-boards brought out to the sidewalks.

Slim-Bodied Hipster. Congregates in flocks throughout Brooklyn, the Lower East Side and the L train. Known for its distinctive plumage and air of superiority. Feeds on a steady diet of cheap beer and irony. Mating song reminiscent of the music of David Byrne. Known for its distinctively repetitive “blogsong.”

Mock Actor. Despite the etymology of its surname, this master of disguise can be found throughout the city’s restaurants, clothiers and coffeehouses in a holding pattern from its true destination: the bright lights of Broadway and movie productions. Weary and frequently bitter, even watchers of the steeliest resolve can be staggered by its song of woe.

I went with Jimi and the boys (who I think I shall start calling “the J. Crew” to avoid writing “Jimi, The Man and Michael” each time) to catch Mission: Impossible III.

We crammed into one of the colossal theaters upstairs at the Lowe’s on 42nd Street with approximately the rest of Manhattan, although it was an attentive and well behaved group.

During his brief moments on-screen, villain Philip Seymour Hoffman is dull and angry, like he was just shaken awake from a nap. Instead of spending time trading zingers in a hero-villian showdown, this movie is more about Cruise globetrotting to retrieve a rogue plot device known as the Rabbit’s Foot, which appears to be an amber liquid in a glass cylinder.

Tons of shaky handheld camera work, to dizzying effect, particularly because our movie screen was one of those so wide that during a two-shot scene, I had to move my head back and forth to track the actors talk to one another.

But as usual, this is a movie less about talk and more about rock. There’s Tom in Rome, China and Germany, dodging missiles and bullets, firing guns, walking up walls, sliding down buildings, impersonating people with those CGI/latex masks again, and freefalling off tall buildings, all within the Violence Lite confines of the PG-13 rating. There’s an amusing scene with Tom scribbling what appear to be advanced geometric equations to plan a swing from one skyscraper to another, Spider-Man style.

There’s so much action, I had forgotten all of it by the time the movie was over. I did however remember the trailers for Over the Hedge and Nacho Libre (starring Jack Black as Chris Farley in Beverly Hills Ninja), both of which I’d like to see; and to a lesser extent, X-Men: The Last Stand and Superman Returns, to fulfill my summertime superhero movie quota.

Afterwards we walked over to the Film Center Cafe for dinner. It’s located in the Theater Distric across the street from the Film Center and keeping in the theme, features a décor of movie posters. Plus, I saw some chick wearing a Ghostbusters T-shirt. For a nice price, I had an extra large and delicious hamburger smothered with mushrooms.

Film Center Cafe

• 635 Ninth Ave.
• (212) 262-2525
• Meal 18 of 52: mushroom burger with fries and cole salw ($9) and a pint of Guinness ($5).

The Man planned a cunning and elaborate surprise for Jimi’s birthday today. A limo picked up our party—Lee-Anne, The Man, Jimi, Mike and myself—outside Jimi’s apartment. Jimi attempted to drink a full glass of ginger ale as the limo lurched around and ended up having to drink most of it at stoplights to avoid slopping it all over the place. We were dropped off for a delicious family-style Italian dinner at Tony’s di Napoli. You must try the sangria; we had two pitchers. The spaghetti is primo, too, with extra-tasty homemade meatballs the size of racquetballs. Jimi ordered a fresh berry parfait dessert, which arrived topped with a candle and a gaggle of servers belting out “Happy Birthday.” The table of hyperactive kids across the room even joined in.

We were then whisked again by limo to Leisure Time for beer and two games of bowling in the near-dark, under strobelights and black lights that made the bowling balls, white clothing and teeth fluoresce.

Tony’s di Napoli

• 147 W. 43rd St.
• (212) 221-0100
• Meal 17 of 52: spaghetti with racquetball-sized meatballs ($19.95, serves two to three) and sangria.

I read with interest the obituary of Allan Kaprow in the April 27th Wall Street Journal. Kaprow, who died April 5th at the age of 78, is credited as the father of Happenings, which are like living public art, and which the article’s author Barbara Rose describes as “theater pieces that fused John Cage’s aesthetics of chance with Jackson Pollock’s physical, gestural manner of painting.”

Kaprow launched the first Happening in 1959 in an artists’ cooperative downtown. Clear plastic walls divided the space into three rooms where performers acted out choreographed movements: a girl squeezing oranges, an artist lighting matches and painting, an orchestra playing toy instruments. Rauschenberg and Johns were among the performers.

Hundreds more traditional-style art-gallery Happenings happened in Manhattan through the ’60; there was some good footage of them in the documentary I saw in February, Who Gets to Call it Art?. But soon after that first one in 1959, Kaprow moved Happenings into the streets to make them even more unexpected, being literally outside of an artistic setting. Here’s one I would have liked to have seen:

In one performance he instructed participants to wait in Times Square and look for a signal from a window. When it came, they were to fall down on the sidewalk. Once that happened, a truck picked them up and cleared the streets of bodies.

I was surprised that the Journal’s obituary closed with Rose stating that Happenings faded away completely starting in the ’70s. Ever since that time, “the boisterous improvisations of the Happenings,” Rose writes, have been replaced by “carefully choreographed, elaborately costumed and phenomenally expensive productions.” She concludes, “[W]hat was born as a Dada gesture has ended as extravagant entertainment.”

I disagree and that’s not how I would have framed the article. I concede the word Happening is as dusty today as beatnik or hippie. But it’s doing Kaprow disservice to not even mention that the spirit of his organized on-the-street performances lives today in the form of the flash mob, defined by this fellow as a “Happening for Internetters,” and in groups like the locally based Improv Everywhere. Read about their shenanigans with blue shirts and Best Buy or an infinite time loop and tell me they’re not something Kaprow would recognize and be proud of.

This morning I took the first step in formulating a vacation to Rome in late August by booking my flight from New York to Dublin and back, because I’ll be going with my sister. Literally at the same time I was online booking this flight, she was online booking the “inner” flight for us between Dublin and Rome on frill-free carrier Ryanair. As I understand it, their planes are fueled with an ethanol-like blend of peat and stout.

It’s trickier logistically but cheaper for me to do it this way, instead of taking a round trip between New York and either of Rome’s two airports. Orbitz told me that not only do most of those flights start at $800 and creep well over $1,000, but have stopovers in places like Casablanca, London and Düsseldorf, the romance of which one can imagine while sitting captive in an airport terminal.

The next big step is to find out where we’ll be staying now that we’ve learned the Roman house of Dana’s charitable organization is standoffish to houseguests. We can probably hostel it like we did in Ireland, which worked conveniently and cost effectively.

I also need to get cracking on the “what to see and do” part of the trip by picking up some more advice online, from the travel guides Jimi graciously donated to me, and from various Italian experts.

Probably the most vocal among the latter is John, a.k.a. “The Cu” (short for the Italian word for “cousin”), who’s the art director for the outfit in Cleveland I worked at before I moved to Manhattan. John’s “da best,” as he might say. He’s like a more forgiving version of Joe Pesci, with a beard and lots of writing utensils. I turn to him for all things Italian. For instance, here’s a lightly edited excerpt from an email exchange I had with him in March regarding Gesturegate:

Jason: What do you think about this Antonin Scalia hand-gesture thing? Was it truly disrespectful or did the reporter misrepresent the facts? Is that an O.K. gesture to make after church? What does “Vaffanculo” mean, anyway?

The Cu: “Vaffanculo” means “up your ass,” capish? (capito, in true Roman Italian dialect). I don’t think he was mad or serious with the gesture, just irritated with the reporter. He’s the man!, cappo di tutti cappo, which means the boss, of the Supreme Court.

Happy belated 75th birthday, Empire State Building. (It was yesterday.)

Not only is my news out of date, so’s my photo; May 1 through 8, the ESB will be lit up all in “classic” white.

Film noir with high school students? It really shouldn’t work, but it does as the premise of Brick, the film I saw tonight.

The moody, loner protagonist still holds a flame for his ex-girlfriend, seeking out her suspicious disappearance among a rouge’s gallery of femme fatales, henchmen, a kingpin, a brainy sidekick and informers, all speaking in quick, clipped slang. Sounds like classic noir, yet most everyone in this cast is a teen and the film takes place in the present, on the grounds and environs of a high school in San Clemente, California.

This isn’t that O.C. It’s 21st Century California Gothic, like Mulholland Drive, with overcast skies, unpeopled landscapes with only a freeway or palm tree punctuating the distance, and secret dark places in culverts and the basements of suburban ranch homes. The score is creepy and percussive, with sounds of battered bells and chimes, and the dialogue’s a mash of slang both current and filched from gangster films of the ’40s and ’50s.

Aside from two scenes that are perhaps intentionally flip because they contain the movie’s only adults, Brick is consistent and grim, dropping squarely into the genre of detective noir, especially The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon and Chinatown. Our hero Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, penance paid for 3rd Rock from the Sun) is sharp and obsessive unraveling the movie’s mystery, willingly getting in too deep investigating the interconnected cliques, gangs and drug ring he suspects have to do with the disappearance of Emily, played by Emilie de Ravin of Lost. He’s repaid with increasingly brutal beatdowns and spends most of the last part of the movie coughing, bleeding, doubling over and blacking out.

Brick is a low-budget production of the Heartwarming Road-to-Fame backstory, shot in 20 days with money scrounged from friends and family, written by director Rian Johnson and edited by him on a Macintosh in his bedroom. It premiered at Sundance last year as a favorite, won the Special Jury Prize “for originality of vision” and has gained generally appreciative and I think deserved reviews.

The greatest detriment of the gumshoe’s shoestring of a budget is that for such a talky, fast-spoken film, much of the dialogue is poorly recorded and tough to catch. That’s a shame because it’s essential to hear it in order to keep straight the characters and their web of connections. I think I’d need to see the film again to really work everything out, although some of the confusion may be hardwired, as in The Big Sleep, which had plot points so obtuse even Raymond Chandler couldn’t clarify them, and he wrote the damn book.