The Frame

This has been on my list for a while as an important neo-noir film, and while I’m glad I watched it, it falls so far short of noir, it’s almost funny. It’s basically Double Indemnity but with an eighties-vibe. Of course, I have anti-’80s bias, as everyone who knows me knows, so I might not even be qualified to speak about Body Heat. The beginning was pretty meh, what with the repetitive music (John Barry! Come on, man, you can so do better than this) that threatened to competely overwhelm the dialogue, such as it was, the overexposed lighting (I think they were going for the sort of light/dark contrast that you get in black and white, but it just doesn’t work in color, and it looked terrible), the dialogue that was trying for that Billy Wilder-esque edge that never quite came off. I knew going into it that there were Double Indemnity similarities, but I didn’t realize they were this strong. If you’re going to watch a noirish wife-and-lawyer-plot-to-kill-husband-with-plenty-of-plot-twists-and-turns, just watch the original. Both Kathleen Turner and William Hurt do a really good acting job, and the plot itself is good. The style just didn’t connect with me at all…which, as I’ve said, may reveal more about my anti-80s bias than anything else…I checked out some IMDb reviews after writing the first part of this reaction, and they’re almost overwhemlingly positive, and most think the film hasn’t aged at all. I disagree. The music is very ’80s-pretending-to-be-’40s-by-way-of-the-’60s, the cinematography is dated…I don’t feel it was a waste of time to watch, or anything, and I enjoyed the second half a good deal. But it has dated, and it doesn’t compare to real noir like Double Indemnity, or to the best neo-noir like L.A. Confidential. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

originally written 3/28/06