Just a note on _Lolita_. I think it's astonishingly funny
(despite the manifest cruelty of HH). Absolutely
Laugh-Out-Loud funny ("Nurse that tooth"). Not only that, I
think the reason the first _Lolita_ movie succeeds (despite a
too-old Lolita) and the more recent J. Irons version fails
miserably, is that the former movie understood how crucial
humor was to N's vision, and the latter ... did not.
Whether _Lolita_ is noir or not ... it borrows conventions
and locales
(esp. motels), and it has an unreliable narrator a la J
Thompson
(writing in the same decade for a very different audience).
So it's noirish, for sure. Noir tends to be a pretty flexible
mode rather than an airtight genre anyway, right?
Just some scattered opinions from a constant lurker,
Michael
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