The Twisted Ways of 'Good Neighbors'

A twisted film noir with two or three very sick characters, the exact number dependant on your point of view, Good Neighbors takes supreme advantage of its grim setting —Montreal in the dead of winter. As any native will tell you, winters there can drive a person crazy.
Although the film’s writer-director Jacob Tierney makes it pretty clear that the tenants of a multi-story apartment complex in the Notre Dame de Grace area are mentally shaky in the best of times. Good Neighbors is a film of acquired taste. If one is willing to accept humor in a movie about a serial killer, if one likes a thriller than emphasizes character over thrills, if one is susceptible to a cast of characters that includes three cats, then the movie has found its very selective target audience. The Canadian film will receive solid reviews and modest box-office returns in south of the border play dates, but Good Neighbors heralds a promising although by no means new talent in actor-turned-writer-director Tierney.
The title is, of course, ironic. The surface friendliness of many of the residents of this aging but well appointed apartment building is mostly a façade. So when three of them seemingly hit it off, there is still general awkwardness all around since everyone feels uncomfortable in one another’s company.
Then there is that serial killer, who menaces young women in the neighborhood. Louise (Emily Hampshire), who works as a waitress in a nearby Chinese restaurant, has become obsessed with the story, scouring Montreal newspapers for any and all stories about each victim. The latest one is a co-worker. Her wheelchair-bound downstairs neighbor Spencer (Scott Speedman) shares her predilection up to a point.
But he mostly likes to keep to himself. Then a new tenant moves in, an elementary school teacher Victor (Jay Baruchel), recently returned to the city from a sojourn in China. Victor eagerly wants to make friends with the other two. Louise and Spencer reluctantly do so but remain wary of the newcomer. To their way of thinking, he is only a tad more agreeable than the crazy, drunken, foul-mouthed tenant (Anne-Marie Cadieux), who hates Louise’s cats. As the trio’s relationships develops, it is soon clear each is a troubled character. Louise’s life is oriented more to her felines, Mozart and Tia Maria, than to humans. Indeed you have to go back to the first 10 minutes of Robert Altman’s classic The Long Goodbye to find a movie where cats figure so prominently.
Victor is almost a benign stalker, a little creepy in his keenness to ingratiate himself to the other tenants, especially Louise on whom he clearly has a crush and soon develops an imaginary love life. Oh, yes, he talks to his mirror too, which in certain movies is always a bad sign. Outwardly Spencer seemsthe best adjusted of the trio despite his handicap. But there is something about his false smile that you instantly distrust. Maybe Spencer is a little too easy-going.
These three live above one another on three separate floors and the walls are paper-thin. In other words, it’s hard to keep secrets in this apartment complex although its manager, Mme Gauthier (veteran actress Micheline Lanctôt), will find herself completely in the dark when a murder takes place in the building itself. Tierney lets his cameras —and those cats, which expand to three when Victor’s cat from China, Balthazar, rejoins him —prowl all over the building from its lobby, stairway and hallways to the fire escape and snowy frontage on a surprisingly deserted street. The place is eerier than a haunted house.
The tensions within the trio’s insular world and then outside their uneasy circle with a crazy neighbor and vicious killer on the loose mount steadily in Tierney’s well orchestrated script, based on a 1982 novel by Chrystine Brouillet. An American might not immediately realize it, but this is a period piece as the story is set in 1995 when all of Quebec was caught up in the referendum about whether the province should sucede from greater Canada. Thus, signs are everywhere urging citizens to vote Oui or Non, which the filmmaker clearly sees metaphorically as a question each character faces in his or her secret life.
This also, as the director makes clear in press notes, puts his story outside the era of DNA and the Internet, which he calls the “death of noir.” Tierney more or less pulls off his elaborate and clever juggling act of elements macabre and disturbing within the seeming normalcy of domestic cats and friendly neighbors. The whole affair is very tongue-in-cheek, a kind of deconstruction of noir atmosphere and its tropes into a meditation on the treachery of the human heart. Working on a modest budget and taking advantage of its very limitations, he brings great vitality and ambiance to a paucity of sets and locations.
Meanwhile his actors deliver wonderfully ambiguous performances. For this isn’t one of those movies where clarity only comes at the end. You’re aware of the identity of the killer before too long. What keeps you guessing is how everyone will react to what they know, or what think they know, about one another. None of which Tierney would have accomplished if it weren’t for animal wranglers Josée Juteau and Raymond Ducasse. Who says you can’t train cats? Opens: July 29 in Los Angeles.
-- Hollywood Reporter

'Gangster Squad' Targets Stone

Emma Stone is reportedly in negotiations for a role in "The Gangster Squad," the highly anticipated feature about the reign of L.A. underworld kingpin Mickey Cohen. Sean Penn is slated to portray the mobster.
The 22-year-old Stone has been in the business for a good amount of time but got everyone's attention with breakout role in last summer's "Easy A." She's also expected to appear in the next "Spiderman" reboot.
Stone has been offered the "Gangster Squad" role of Jean, a woman romantically attached to two men: the gangster Cohen and the police officer who is chasing him down.
Ryan Gosling is playing Sgt. Jerry Wooters. Josh Brolin and Michael Pena also star.
The movie is about Cohen, the Brooklyn-born gangster who was sent to Los Angeles by Meyer Lansky to keep an eye on Bugsy Siegel. Cohen became a mob kingpin himself in the 1940s, and at one point fired rounds from two .45-caliber handguns into the ceiling of the Hotel Roosevelt lobby.
"Gangster Squad" is based on a series of articles by Paul Lieberman. "L.A. Rex" author Will Beall wrote the script.
Ruben Fleischer is directing and Dan Lin and Kevin McCormick are producing.

Let There Be 'Brighton Rock'

Some great news: "Brighton Rock," the acclaimed new adaptation of Graham Greene‘s classic novel, will be seen in U.S. theaters August 26, thanks to IFC. The film depicts the story of Pinkie, a lowly gangster who romances a naive, lonely waitress, Rose, after she discovers evidence he committed murder.
Fans of British cinema will certainly remember the beloved 1947 version, starring Richard Attenborough as Pinkie, Carol Marsh as Rose, and the fine Hermione Baddeley as Rose’s motherly protector, Ida.
In the new version, Control‘s Sam Riley, Andrea Riseborough, and Dame Helen Mirren step into the roles, with Andy Serkis and John Hurt rounding out the excellent cast. The film is 28 Weeks Later screenwriter Rowan Joffe‘s feature-film directorial debut.
Carey Mulligan was slated to play Rose but decided to do "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" instead. Whether or not that was a wise move is up for debate, but Riseborough’s performance in the film is said to be “star-making.” The Guardian declared the film “masterpiece” and singled out Riseborough’s acting as particularly skillful. “To say her achievement deserves an Oscar would be somehow to demean it,” raved David Cox. Riseborough was one of our 5 British Breakout Film Stars of 2010, as well as one of our Top 5 British Actresses of the year.

Nicholson Times Two Tonight

A double bill of "Chinatown" and "The Two Jakes" with a special appearance by screenwriter Robert Towne. It takes place at The Aero in Santa Monica.

Remembering the City's Prince of Pulp

"It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window."
-- Raymond Chandler, "Farewell, My Lovely," 1940

This Saturday, July 23, marks the 123rd anniversary of the birth of one of this city's greatest fiction writers, Raymond Chandler. Chandler was born on July 23, 1888 in Chicago. But Los Angeles is the city with which he is most closely associated, and where his mystery novels are set.
Chandler's most famous creation is private detective Philip Marlowe, who prowled the "mean streets" of Los Angeles, a term that Chandler coined. Marlowe was a citadel of moral fiber in a city that had long ago lost its way, seeming to spiral downward into a pit of decay and decadence. Through it all, Marlowe soldiered on, but it was a lonely struggle.
Chandler turned to fiction writing after a failed career as an oil company executive. His hard drinking caused him to be fired in the midst of the Depression. He wrote short stories for pulp crime magazines, and eventually, by age 50, published his first novel, "The Big Sleep."
His novels reflected his attitude toward Los Angeles -- the city is every bit a character in his fiction as is Marlowe. He saw L.A. as a sun-drenched paradise rotting from the inside, filled with hopefuls determined to reinvent themselves, and hucksters looking to make a quick score at the expense of the suckers.
Hired on to adapt James M. Caine's novel "Double Indemnity" to the screen, Chandler not only co-wrote the script with director Billy Wilder, he appeared in one of the film's scenes, reading and smoking a cigarette in a hallway as Fred MacMurray walks by -- a fact that went undiscovered for 55 years.
In addition to "Double Indemnity," Chandler also penned the "The Blue Dahlia" screenplay. His addiction to alcohol was so strong he allegedly went on a round-the-clock bender and dictated the script to secretaries in order to meet the deadline.
He died in 1959 in La Jolla, Calif., tired, written out and alcoholic. It wasn't until some years after his death that American critics began to hold his writing in equal esteem with that of the country's other great authors. Disappointing for Chandler, but like Marlowe he more or less took his lot in stride. He was fighting the good fight.


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Crime Double Feature At LACMA

Get set for a night of Los Angeles crime on film. Robert Altman's "The Long Goodbye," based on the Raymond Chandler novel of the same title and starring Elliot Gould (pictured at right), screens with Nicholas Ray's noir masterpiece "In A Lonely Place," starring Humphrey Bogart in one of his most masterful performances. The show starts at 7:30 p.m. Friday, July 22, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Googie Withers, “The Lady Vanishes,” “Night and the City”

Googie Withers, 94, a British actress best known for her appearance in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 film “The Lady Vanishes,” died July 15 at her home in Sydney. The cause of death was not disclosed.
Georgette Lizette Withers was born March 12, 1917, in Karachi, then part of British India. She was given her lifetime nickname by her Indian nanny.
Her family moved back to Britain where Ms. Withers began acting at age 12. She was a dancer in a West End production in London when she was offered work in 1935 as a film extra in “The Girl in the Crowd.”
Soon after starting work, director Michael Powell fired one of the female leads and she stepped into the role.
Ms. Withers appeared in dozens of films in the 1930s and ’40s, but was probably best known for her role as Blanche in “The Lady Vanishes” playing opposite Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave. She was dubbed by the English press as “the best bad girl in British films.”
She appeared in many other films, including “It Always Rains On Sunday” (1947), in which she sheltered a killer on the run, played by John McCallum, an Australian actor she married in 1948.
Ms. Withers also appeared in several British wartime dramas in the 1940s and played the memorable role of Helen Nosseross in the 1950 film noir classic “Night and the City,” directed by Jules Dassin and starring Richard Widmark and Gene Tierney.
In the 1950s, she acted on the British stage before moving to Australia with her husband in 1958. The couple co-starred in 10 popular films together, and Ms. Withers had occasional theatrical roles on Broadway and in England through the 1980s.
Ms. Withers won an acting award for her part as a prison governor in the 1970s British television series “Within These Walls.” She starred in the 1986 BBC adaptation of Anita Brookner’s novel “Hotel du Lac” and in a 1987 BBC production of Jane Austen’s “Northanger Abbey.”
Ms. Withers appeared in the well-received 1994 film “Country Life,” directed by Michael Blakemore, an adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” set in Australia in 1919.
In 1996, she portrayed a writer who furthers the career of pianist David Helfgott, played by Geoffrey Rush, in the popular film “Shine.”
When she was 85 in 2002, Ms. Withers shared the stage in London’s West End with her husband and Vanessa Redgrave in Oscar Wilde’s “Lady Windermere’s Fan.”
McCallum died last year at 91. Survivors include three children.