‘Big Sleep,’ ‘Murder, My Sweet’ at Nuart

The Nuart’s two-week Pulp Noir series begins Friday with a dynamite Raymond Chandler double feature, “The Big Sleep” (1946) and “Murder, My Sweet” (1944).

There’s a famous Hollywood anecdote about how director Howard Hawks and writers William Faulkner, Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett couldn’t figure out whodunit and Chandler proved no help.

But the plot exists to bring together a mythic couple, Humphrey Bogart as the incorruptible, plain-talking private eye Philip Marlowe and a sultry, insinuating Lauren Bacall as a lady in more distress than she cares to admit; the chemistry still crackles.

Ironically, Chandler thought that Dick Powell, once and for all breaking his musical comedy star image, was closer to his notion of Marlowe, who in the second film, directed by Edward Dmytryk, tangles with Claire Trevor’s calculating glamour puss over her stolen jade jewelry. Bogart and Bacall are Hollywood legend but Powell and Trevor are also terrific.

Information: (310) 478-6379.

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Life in ‘Oblivion’: Too esoteric--and too pokily paced--for mainstream release, “Oblivion,” a hip and deliberately silly science-fiction Western sendup, finds an ideal niche as a midnight movie, playing Fridays and Saturdays at the Sunset 5 starting this weekend.

Director Sam Irvin and a raft of writers leave no cliche unspoofed as the reptilian alien Redeye (Andrew Divoff) with a Jack Palance manner means to take over the frontier town of Oblivion--the film, amusingly, was shot in Romania. Richard Joseph Paul is the pacifist hero of the piece.

The film’s most focused, funniest turn is by Jimmie F. Skaggs as Paul’s Native American sidekick.

Julie Newmar, the local saloon proprietor, has fun with her Cat-woman character in the “Batman” TV series; George Takei does a hilarious takeoff on boozy Doc Holliday; and Carel Struycken plays a baleful, psychic undertaker--they will all appear Friday at the film’s opening.

Information: (213) 848-3500.

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Metaphor for Repression: Nagisa Oshima’s 1969 “Diary of a Shinjuku Thief” (8 p.m. Saturday at Beyond Baroque, 681 Venice Blvd., Venice), an apocalyptic vision of youth in revolt against established order, is so surreal that it is open to limitless interpretations.

A young man (Tadamori Yokoo) steals a copy of Genet’s “Journals” and winds up seducing a pretty young woman (Rie Yokoyama) who has observed him. Their lovemaking, however, misfires, and, in taking flight, Yokoyama is attacked by two men in the street. Oshima takes this situation and turns it into a nightmare, intricately structuring a flood of brutally powerful imagery through which sexual frustration gradually emerges as a stunning metaphor for political repression.

Information: (310) 827-3006.