With the passing of James Gandolfini today, I realized that I was going to want to watch something of his tonight. I had already hit a few of his other movies recently. Well, within the last year that is. The only movie left that I actually own with Gandolfini in it wasThe Man Who Wasn't There, which I have not watched in a while.

What's really ironic about this whole situation of ending up choosing The Man Who Wasn't There was just a couple of days ago, I had kind of blasted a p*ss poor version of the Film Noir genre after watching Warehouse 13's episode titled The Big Snag, which more or less made fun of the genre and didn't do it justice. While watching the episode, I kept saying to myself that I needed to watch The Man, to see how you do the genre right. And that's exactly what Ethan and Joel do. It's top shelf stuff. Overall, this is a solid story that follows Ed (Billy Bob Thornton) who lives an uneventful life, one that is spectacularly unremarkable that makes him a "ghost" in the eyes of those close to him. A domino effect of situations starts rolling from a single, botched blackmail gone wrong.

One of the coolest things I've seen, be it on the written page or on the screen takes place in The Man Who Wasn't There. There is a scene where Ed puts his wife Doris (Frances McDormand) into bed and starts to narrate the details of how he and his wife met. His story is leading somewhere as he says "It was only a couple of weeks later that she suggested we get married" when he gets a phone call from Big Dave Brewster (James Gandolfini) asking him to meet him down at his store late at night. He goes to meet him and ends up killing him in self defense. The whole scene is around 10 minutes long. He returns back home and sits on the bed beside his sleeping wife and finishes the story....."It was only a couple of weeks later that she suggested we get married". How f*cking cool is that? You have to know how to write first in order to be able to pull off a scene where the storytelling is both reflective and calm and somewhere in the middle is a gruesome death. Props to Joel Coen and Ethan Coen. They can do no wrong in my eyes.

I highly recommend this as a Buy for those that are fans of the Film Noir genre and want to see how to do it justice. This is the finest example of a contemporary version of the genre since the heyday's when it was at its peak. Great cast also includes Scarlett Johansson, Tony Shalhoub and Christopher McDonald.