The Salvation reminded me of Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns. Not, I should hasten to add, because it approaches the mastery of Leone’s films, but rather in the way a foreign filmmaker (director Kristian Levring is Danish) approaches an acutely American genre from a unique perspective. There are some Leone similarities in how Levring’s screenplay (co-written…
There’s a tendency for debut directors to treat their first films as a highlight reel, collecting every great shot they’ve ever imagined, referencing every great film and emphasising this is what I can do over this is what I have to say. Ana Lili Amirpour occasionally falls into this trap in A Girl Walks Home…
Like the paper flowers that William Blake (Johnny Depp) finds absent natural scent, Dead Man is built on self-conscious artificiality. Jim Jarmusch’s neo-Western is as influenced by woodcut animation or a matinee performance of a silent-movie serial; where Sergio Leone’s post-modern approach the Western exaggerated the cinematic tropes of the genre, Jarmusch filters those conventions…
(Note: this post does not follow the normal 200-word word limit of this blog) First up – I’ve been pretty slack when it comes to posting these awards. This is mostly because I’m still venturing my way into the blogosphere (if that’s even a word), and partly because it was basically impossible to do an…
The recent death of Jess Franco inspired me to revisit his filmography (well, some of it). Like many of his films, A Virgin among the Living Dead is laced with an erotic energy, but it’s built on a seductive, languorous atmosphere rather than just flashes of naughty bits (though there’s plenty of them, natch). Discovering…
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