Miller's Crossing
Takes the cake for one of the most convoluted plots in a film noir. Makes Memento seem like The Straight Story. I posit it’s literally impossible to follow on the first view.
It’s a weird tonal mix between highly dramatic scenes, and goofy action sequences, straight out of Dick Tracy. This is almost the two kinds of Coen Brothers film rolled into one.
It seems like a subversion of most noir stories. Instead of an anti-hero protagonist, he’s a straight up villain, playing the part of the anti-hero. The big bad is a fluffy teddy bear (but an artist with the Tommy gun), and the femme fatale fails to seduce the hero and doesn’t get anything she wants.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.