I’ve said before that in my opinion, the last genuine film noir was The Friends of Eddie Coyle in 1973. It was the last movie made that simply was film noir without making a conscious effort to be in the genre.
All the films since then that have been called film noir are consciously trying to imitate the look and feel of the classics of the genre. They’re homages to film noir rather than examples of it.
Oh, I would call “Body Heat” and “The Last Seduction” film noir, straight up.
Who knows? I don’t have to explain a lone Disney marketing choice in order to reject the hypothesis the people aren’t investing in musicals. I just have to point out Into the Woods, or Annie, or Jersey Boys, or The Sapphires, or Pitch Perfect, or Pitch Perfect 2, or Les Mis, or Enchanted, or Mama Mia, or something else I’m forgetting.
If Chinatown was just an homage, it was a an homage that is indistinguishable from the best of its genre. And by that standard, Touch of Evil was also just an homage.
I think that almost all noir was very consciously an homage to the earlier works in the genre.
And it’s been 16 years since the last good “stoner noir whose narrator thinks it’s a Western.”
Man, if you’re going to be argumentative, you can’t shrug and play the “I don’t have to explain” card.
Sapphires was an Australian movie-- Not Hollywood.
Pitch Perfect isn’t a musical. It’s a movie about and featuring singing but it isn’t a musical.
Jersey Boys flopped which may be why they are backing off on promoting Into the Woods and Annie as musicals.
Mama Mia… like 6 years ago? Enchanted even older?
You aren’t really forgetting anything. You are listing all of them. And that’s not a STRONG genre by any stretch.
Spinoff thread here:
I disagree. I feel that these movies were clearly homages. And I’m not saying “just an homage” - a lot of these homages were better than many of the movies they were imitating. But the people that made these movies were aware of the film noir genre and were consciously striving to adopt its look and feel in a way that the first generation of film noir makers were not.
Does the main character have to be a detective - I mean, have you seen Brick or Prisoners? I thought they were better mysteries than say, Gone Baby Gone or Blood that had detective protagonists.
Piranha 3-D was a good T&A movie
Piranha 3-DD was pretty bad.
No, really, I’m serious.
Piranha 3-D admitted what it was and revelled in naked young-adult flesh, with many multi-second shots of T&A. Oh, and slashing homicidal fish stripping the bones of any living creature stupid enough to get near them in mere seconds.
I remember reviewing this movie to friends like this: The movie makers decided that they would make a movie specifically geared to teenage boys. What do teenage boys like? Boobs and blood. So they packed as much boobs and blood into this movie as they could, and wrapped a not-horrible story around it.
Piranha 3-DD on the other hand tried to put a “nudge, nudge, wink, wink” in there and failed miserably. All of the T&A scenes lasted about 1/2 a second, as if the movie makers were trying to say, “oooh, how did these boobs get in here???” Complete fail. If you’re going to make a T&A movie, OWN IT.
I now return to my normal, adult age. 
J.
I saw Brick, which I felt was more an example of the hard-boiled detective genre than film noir.
In my opinion, the hard-boiled detective story has a protagonist who lives by a code even when it forces him to make choices he doesn’t like - this trope also appears in a lot of westerns. But in a film noir, the protagonist doesn’t live by a code and self-destructs. In a sense, the two genres are flip sides of each other.
So if Sam Spade had decided to forget about avenging his partner’s murder and had just taken off with Brigid O’Shaughnessy, The Maltese Falcon would have been a film noir. (I realize many people say The Maltese Falcon is a film noir. But I disagree.)
Both of those subgenres were what you’d call “drive-in movies”. The Elvis filmography, and the Frankie and Annette beach party movies, were actually the best of the lot, relatively, because they had bigger studios investing more in them. Below them were the kind of movies that now have another name: “MST movies”. Eegah and Horror of Party Beach and so forth. They had a built-in audience: teenagers would pay to get in, and spend the whole time hanging out or making out. (Sorry, “necking”.) They didn’t have to be any good, as long as there were a few musical numbers performed by a band that worked cheap.
Nowadays, it costs so much to get a movie shown in the theater, producers won’t send anything into wide release unless they’re confident it will pay off bigtime. Junk movies are now “straight-to-video movies”. Troma, Full Moon/Concorde, and like that. Troma has the Toxic Avenger series, and a lot of zombie movies. But that’s what people prefer for time-filler movies. Also, boobies, which you didn’t get in the 1960s, and in fact, there weren’t nearly as many bikinis as advertised.
The social problem film.
The military comedy, like MAS*H or Kelly’s Heroes. Recent examples listed by IMDB users were Tropic Thunder, which I consider a satire of Hollywood, and The Men Who Stare at Goats, which I haven’t seen. Buffalo Soldiers (2001) was a decent example IMO, if not very funny.
The screwball comedy. Wikipedia’s most recent example is The Emperor’s New Groove, which I never would have called screwball, but I guess I can see the elements. Hard to separate this genre from the romantic comedy anyway.
Related to the screwball is the comedy of errors, where the plot revolves around fools and mistaken identities. I suspect there probably are plenty of modern examples of this, but they’re not the sort of film I’d know about. The genre might have been worn out by television. Hard to search for examples as the Shakespeare gets in the way.
The giant bug movie, although natural horror movies still get made.
Straight to YouTube, these days.
Not a movie, but there was a TV series Enlisted earlier this year. I’ll admit I didn’t see it but I’ve heard it was pretty good. Fox, however, apparently had lost its interest in the series before it aired and it got Fireflyed.
I suppose I was an outlier, but I quickly lost interest in those movies, even as a teenager, because of the way the “high school” girls all sported D-cups and “hippy” bikini-model figures, and were clearly too old to be in high school. C’mon, I was in high school and could look around and see that I was not surrounded by porn stars.
On the “not fun” topic, Cracked.com recently did a good piece comparing DC’s movies to Marvel’s:
It’s specific to DC-Marvel stuff, but I think a lot of it applies more generally.
I’ve never quite understood the point of Film Noir being a “genre”. In my frankly miniscule understanding, it was just a reaction to the fact that for a while movies were all super cheerful. So then there were some movies that were deliberately stylistically dark as a reaction to that.
In modern times, when serious movies made by serious studios can have all sorts of serious tones, film noir just doesn’t make sense… it just seems stylized and silly. Not to mention that its general conventions and cinematic choices have been adopted by any number of other films that aren’t strictly “film noir”.
There were, but unfortunately they didn’t show much and were too securely fastened to be titillating (so to speak). 
I’ve got a huge organ!
And I hear Judy is quite the organ grinder!
To be fair the advertizing for Sweeney Todd from a few years ago completely hid the fact that it was a musical.