![]() She gives herself a quick, amusing makeover, slipping on a trench coat and dyeing her hair blond, a tint that evokes Barbara Stanwyck’s viperous vamp in “ Double Indemnity.” The trench at least fits Jill, a rather ordinary, opaque Nancy Drew. ![]() The very next day, the cops are putting a toe tag on Heather, and Jill is a person of interest and soon on the run, having fled a detective (John Cho) who’s more suavely cinematic than professionally adept. Heather has a meeting with a filmmaker, Greg (an amusingly acid Nelson Franklin), one of those jaundiced, permanently disappointed industry types who doubtless read Nathanael West’s “The Day of the Locust” at too tender an age. It’s a decidedly ordinary scene, even if cinephiles might flash on a different woman staring into a glowing box in the explosive 1955 noir “ Kiss Me Deadly.” As she often is, Jill is waiting for Heather (Zoë Kravitz), a young star going through some kind of undefined rough patch. Jill (an appealing Lola Kirke), a personal assistant, is sitting behind the wheel of a parked car, her face lighted by a cellphone. Like a lot of intrigues, this one opens at night. But as that upside-down palm tree suggests, he is coming at Los Angeles from his own angle. Katz gives “Gemini” the expected smoggy freeways and a blonde on a billboard, as well as the kind of mystery that certain Hollywood dreams are made of, complete with a femme fatale, a detective and a lonely horn on the soundtrack. Perfectly framed and photographed, its feathery fronds spreading in silhouette against a dark-indigo night sky, the tree hangs in the shot like a chandelier. It’s no wonder moviegoers and other virtual tourists can map it in their heads without visiting it, even if the Los Angeles they probably know is little more than an aerial view of the Hollywood sign, a cutaway to a clogged freeway and a slavering look at a bountiful blonde.Įvery so often, a filmmaker plays with these banalities, which I imagine is why Aaron Katz opens “Gemini,” a pleasurably drifty, low-wattage mystery set in Los Angeles, with an upside-down shot of a palm tree. ![]() It’s a hazy dream, a gaudy fantasy, a noirish nightmare, an Instagramble cliché. A city partly made by the movies and defined by them, too, Los Angeles rarely comes off like a lived reality onscreen. There are millions of stories in the naked city, and a lot of them have been filmed in Los Angeles.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |