It is my opinion that this is a film genre that has been neglected or satirized to the point of obscurity/absurdity, and I would like to see it return.
I want to see it return in first person narrative, in B&W, and I don’t even care if it is present day or set in the past, although I prefer the 40’s and early 50’s time period.
I believe there are many “True Cime” stories just waiting to be explored, and with today’s film technology, these could be some very exciting motion pictures.
Thanks
Q
It’s not black and white but you need to see “Brick” as soon as possible my friend.
Have you seen L.A. Confidential ? I don’t think it would be possible to get a closer approximation of film noir these days.
I love film noir, and we had a nice thread about it right after the Oscars this year.
See Brick if it comes to your town. It’s not in black and white, but it’s a modern take on film noir and a very good one. People are definitely still fascinated by crime stories. I find forensic dramas boring as hell, so here’s hoping film noir has a little revival. Sin City had that influence and did well for itself, so I guess it could happen.
The Man Who Wasn’t There is another half-decent recent(-ish) effort.
Well, it’s not B&W, and there’s no first-person narration (no narration of any kind), but for a really terrific take on modern noir (the director says “detective story,” but a lot of folks are labeling it noir) I highly recommend Brick:
And I’m not the only one. Lots of raves are rolling in. Here’s one:
New Yorker review (begins at 5th paragraph)
There seems to be a resurgence of noir these days - there was a CS thread about this around Oscar time - so no doubt your wishes will be granted sooner than later. Good luck.
Heh. I guess I spent too much time looking for links… 
And I got punished by my computer refusing to reload the site. There were no replies when I posted. 
Christopher Nolan’s Memento and Following are both good noirish movies. Experimental Noir, if you will.
The problem is that film noir isn’t really a genre; it’s just a catch-all term the French critics applied to a whole bunch of American movies that shared certain characteristics. (The French critics, as so often, loved American culture more than Americans did; American critics tended to dismiss those movies as violent potboilers, but the French noticed how great they were.) Those characteristics were very much a part of a particular national mood (post-WWII anxiety), a particular style of cinematography (lots o’ shadows) and a particular type of crime story (stories with lots of double-crossing where no one can be trusted). You can pay homage to noir, the way a lot of movies have done over the years, but to actually make a film noir you’d almost have to be transported back in time to 1947.
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang provided one of the best times I had in a movie theater last year – it’s pretty lighthearted, but it doesn’t take much stretching to fit under a film noir descriptor.
Okay. Then what’s the definition of a “genre”?
I don’t think Film Noir is gone. I just think it’s changed, and almost unrecognizable from it’s roots. . .just like Jazz or Rock has changed since the 50’s.
Here’s some things I’d call modern Noir. . .
Insomnia (also Nolan, and more noir-ish, IMO, than Momento)
Three Coen brother’s movies. . .“Blood Simple”, “Fargo” and “The Big Lebowski” (compare to “The Long Goodbye”, e.g.).
I might toss “Collateral” in there. Maybe “A Simple Plan”.
But I’d say that what makes something “noir” for me – more than the directorial style – is a “lonely” lead, set against a mystery, and in conflict with a world that they’re somewhat disconnected from.
Think about what you’re saying there. In today’s cultural context it would be impossible to do that without the result being either a satire of the film noir genre or a pastiche of it – not an actual contribution to the film noir canon. It would be like trying to make a musical like those you can see excerpted in That’s Entertainment.
Maybe I missed something while watching, but both The Man Who Wasn’t There and Sin City seemed genuine in intent, as did Newsies.
You can’t do true noir today. I want to emphasize what others have said. Noir was a cultural response to a particular time in history. Post WWII the world was in tatters, both physically and emotionally. Lots of soldiers came back home with what today we would call Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. They had the skills to kill and the knowledge of personal death-dealing, and found that the consumerist society around them held no place for their sort.
In addition, the light fantasies of Hollywood were no longer as interesting to an audience who had seen the dark side of the world. Because of the war and the change in the audience the films could take a fresh, darker, and above all more cynical view of everyday life in America. Cynicism is a response to wartime experiences that followed the Civil War, WWI, WWII, and Vietnam. It’s not a core American value, and the cynical periods are always short lived. Americans replace cynicism with the more palatable irony.
That’s where we are now. None of the cultural impulses behind noir exist. The Iraq War is too limited to affect the greater mass of the viewing public. We are in a veritable Golden Age of prosperity and consumerism. We are essentially shock-proof as well: no commentary on American life or values is taboo in mainstream movies. (Not the same thing as the taboo on hardcore sex.) Noir was a statement that mainstream America had changed. There has been no such change in mainstream America in recent years to match that.
Noir doesn’t exist because there is nothing for it to comment on. There are still issues, of course, and there is still darkness, but they aren’t the same and the true original responses are different. It’s the difference between rhythm ‘n’ blues and rap. You can trace the evolution of one to the other, but rap is today’s idiom of response and rhythm ‘n’ blues can only be referenced as a look to the past.
Some aspects of art are timeless, and some are time dependent. Noir is the latter.
P.S. Sin City was as artificial as garden gnomes.
And if they did, filmmakers would invent some entirely new genre, as cynical as noir but otherwise bearing no resemblance to it, no more than rap resembles r&b.
Remember what I said? That any contemporary attempt to make a noir in the old style would be either pastiche or parody? The Man Who Wasn’t There is a noir pastiche, Sin City is a noir parody (if it can be so dignified). No cinemaphile would ever confuse either with an actual product of the noir genre from the '40s and '50s.
It’s 20+ years old, but another “modern” noir you might enjoy would be “Body Heat.”
Also look for Luchino Visconti’s “Ossessione” – it’s from 1943, but you might have missed it, being an Italian noir. It’s a great movie (the very first screen adaptation of “The Postman Always Rings Twice”), and in my opinion far superior to the other, more famous, Visconti movie I’ve seen, “A Death in Venice.”
I fear the modern noir doomsayers may be right. But I wonder if the time might be right for some fine films noir to come from some other country with a more suitable situation. I dunno, China perhaps? Disillusionment with the Communist state, the bankruptcy of the international brotherhood? Just an idea.
Humpf. I came here to nominate that, but since I’ve been beaten to the punch, how’s about Chinatown. Color, true, but it is period, has a loner against impossible odds, and that overall noir feeling.
DD