Greenes
Please don't spend money on this.
SanEat
A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."
chaos-rampant
This has the basic fulcrum of noir; red-haired devilish femme fatale, the schmuck who is bedeviled by desire for sex and money, looking bamboozled while being smitten by cruelly ironic fate, desire that bends reality and manifests in offbeat ways. I do like that we have it dictating metaphorical spaces of being lured and trapped by that desire.A hole in the ground that he has to keep feeding with money. Watching through binoculars at sex across the street, inflamming the desire. A dream where he's inside a giant ferry wheel and buffed around while she is playing his life at dice down below. The embarrassment of rolling on the floor with her when his colleagues walk through the door. It ends in an aptly noirish way, quoting Detour, where he's been the narrator gone mad as he waits hopelessly in some desert limbo, flicking through the photo-album that chronicles a life wasted when desire entered the pictures and all this (diner, photos) as being trapped in his own mind that relives the past and is conjuring the film itself.Even that is rather intermittent here, not the result of focused vision like the Coens or Almodovar did. Truth be told, I'm simply not too enamored of the obviousness that accompanies many of these modern attempts at film noir. It's like an excessively made up face wearing with some effort a selfconscious grimace as it makes its way through the amoral occasion. For whatever reason I am reminded a lot of Lynne's attempt at Lolita; something that was elusively fluid in its original guise, stultified by too much focus on grooming appearances.Oldman affects his usual twitching self, rather apt in the whole thing. The femme fatale can be overtly sexual in ways she couldn't in Hays code days.Noir Meter: 3/4 | Neo-noir or post noir? Neo
NateWatchesCoolMovies
Peter Medak's Romeo Is Bleeding is one of the most overlooked crime films of the 90's. It's a downbeat, pitch black, simmering sociopathic neo noir filled to the brim with excellent character actors and actresses inhabiting various delicious cop, gangster and femme fatale roles. It has a lyrical, moody poetry to it it, evoking the noir flicks of the 40's albeit with a decidedly modern, violent and demoralizing bite to it. Gary Oldman, in a monumentally underrated performance, plays Jack Grimaldi, a sleaze bag cop attempting to play the Police force, the Feds and the mob against each other in order to make obscene amounts of dirty money for himself. He's a two timing, amoral asshole of a protagonist, but Oldman plays him in a stray dog, sheepish way that you just can't help root for him, and feel like an outlaw doing so. Of course his scheme falls apart (as all schemes like this do, in movie land) spectacularly so, at the hands of Mona Demarkov (Lena Olin) a tyrannical, deranged Russian contract killer with a penchant for gleeful brutality and unhinged violence. Olin is a wonder in the role, a grinning black velvet spider and a source of constant nightmares for Jack, as well as the audience. The film has a darkly comic, almost fairy tale like quality to it, a sense of inevitable karmic catastrophe at the hands of the mob and the law. Oldman mournfully narrates the proceedings from a hazy desert enclave that may or may not just be a dream, and yearns for a second chance. Medal directs with steely, melodramatic precision. Juliette Lewis does her early 90's ditzy thing to perfection, Annabella Sciorra is sweet as Jack's poor wife, the only sympathetic character in the whole deal, Roy Scheider feels a bit miscast as the vengeful mob boss, but Ron Perlman, Michael Wincott, Will Patton, James Chromwell, David Proval and Dennis Farina are top notch in welcome cameos. I feel like this script alone should have gotten a lot more attention, let alone the simply stunning, beautiful film that it has turned into. Anyone who's a fan of crime films, noir, good story lines, and this troupe of actors (and really, how can you not be, just look at this cast!!) will love this.
CountZero313
Revisiting Romeo is Bleeding after a number of years, I was struck by what still works, what doesn't, and how wonderful endings allow us to overlook any number of faults that lead up to them.Gary Oldman is Jack, a corrupt DS well-loved by his men looking to build an ill-gotten nest egg towards early retirement. And on one level it is all going so well, except enough is never enough, and he just can't leave the ladies alone.Enter Mona (Lena Olin), a femme fatale who manages to inhabit both the femme and the fatale completely. The cop in Jack knows to cuff her, lock her up, and throw away the key, but the Jack in Jack has another agenda.Romeo is Bleeding is every frame a modern noir thriller, made great by Hilary Henkin's script exhibiting detailed reverence for the genre, and some unparalleled performances by the actors. Oldman is breath-taking, cynical and world-weary delivering his Marlowe-style quips, raw and vulnerable reaching crescendo when he puts a gun barrel in his mouth. It would be too much to ask his co-stars to outshine him, but they certainly keep up. Olin produces a nightmarish laugh at the most inappropriate times, and Juliette Lewis's cocktail waitress (what else?) Sheri's innocence is perfectly ignorant, far too ignorant to survive in this brutal arena. Annabella Sciorra as Natalie completes the trio of Jack's women, his not-so-unaware wife. She is not as cold-hearted towards Jack as Mona, not as infatuated as Sheri, but her flawed love contains a bit of both. She points a gun at him, and we know she knows. Sitting on the porch they have one of those oblique conversations only old married couples know, where every utterance is sub-text, and restraint and feigned ignorance are the name of the game. Jack never quite gets to grips with her, and that is to be his ultimate tragedy.There are hints of Chandler here (the letter to Jack from The Boys), and Chinatown, too, most noticeably in the bloodied, deformed demeanor of the protagonist in the final third, but Romeo is Bleeding is a stylish noir piece that acknowledges its antecedents without racking up debts.And then there is the ending, of such heartbreaking, poignant beauty, Oldman and Sciorra pitch-perfect, deftly shot and edited, a wave you ride and crash on shore with. Startling, stunning, and yet how could this tale have ended otherwise? "Sometimes, she stays a little longer. And then she's gone." Not a perfect film, but a perfect ending, and I'll take that every time.
jungkvist
I really like film noir, but the films were usually done on the cheap, and suffered from it. I much prefer modern noir movies: Body Head, Lucky Number Sleven and, especially, Romeo is Bleeding. Bleak, sexy, filled with human frailty: Romeo is Bleeding navigates the fall of a weak police detective, led down the path of destruction by Lena Olin, who I would gladly follow into a blast furnace.Not since Ingred Bergman (also a Swede)has an actess done the slow burn like Lena Olin. Olin is a throw back to the studio stars of the 40s and 50s, when women were strong, tough, and oozed sex and seduction. When Olin hangs Gary Oldman out to dry, all you can say is, "Dude, that sucks, but I'm with ya." This movie is hardcore...Gary Oldman is hardcore...and Lena Olin is hardcore crazy. Olin seduces Oldman with her smile and her laughter. Such glee, such evil, such sexual energy: Olin is the flame and Oldman is the moth, and all men chorus, "Dude, That sucks, but I'm with ya."
