Out of the Furnace (2013)

The modern western gets a modern runtime; western fans may want Out of the Furnace

2 Guns (2013)

2 Guns transplants the buddy cop film onto a western setting; hilarity ensues

Only God Forgives (2013)

"What if David Lynch went to Bangkok and made a surreal Bangkok Dangerous with Royston Tan as his DP?"

Jack Reacher (2012)

A lone gunman is caught with incontrovertible evidence. A badass former MP is brought in to either clear his name or make him hang.

The gimmick: a classic Western (Reacher as the man of violence from out of town) masquerading as a gumshoe procedural. Note: this is purely the director's spin on the novels, not the author's.

Watch for: clever scriptwriting, grasp of genre cinema, the very limited Tom Cruise cast in an appropriate and effective role.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 19 December 2012.

True Grit (2010)

A precocious 14-year-old browbeats the meanest, baddest US Marshall in the land to bring justice to her family.

In their remake, the Coen brothers decide to play up the inherent comedy in the premise...

Because you can't really get any funnier than pairing up a violent, pragmatic old man with a naive, idealistic and precocious girl in a western.

Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 23 February 2011.

14 Blades (锦衣卫) (2010)

Will Daniel Lee stumble and falter once more before the end of the first act of his new movie?

What wonderful, far-fetched premise does he draw upon this time in his wuxia tale?

How does he fail miserably (but still, entertainingly!) to fulfil this premise?


Read my full review at Fridae, first published on 3 February 2010.

Don't Come Knocking (2005)

A special kind of mood is required to watch the world go by. Or a Wim Wenders film, for the matter.

Long before Sofia Coppola was doing Lost in Translation, Wim Wenders was beating a trail in intercultural cinema. The German-born, American-influenced (Wenders grew up in occupied Germany), and French-educated auteur is known for works like Paris, Texas, Tokyo-Ga, and Wings of Desire.

From their titles alone, you’d have an idea of what to expect from a Wim Wenders movie. One can imagine dislocated persons wandering around in foreign landscapes, alienated yet searching for some common humanity with others. As a filmmaker of the old European school, Wenders eschews the tyranny of realism and plot in favour of the image and the soundtrack. Whether it is angels perched on top of skyscrapers and statues or even slow pans of the desert vistas of the American Southwest, watching any of his movies is a cinematic experience of pure experience. Dialogue may be at a minimum and the plot may take a while to develop and then a while for us to figure out, but in those many minutes, we chill out in our seats admiring the stunning cinematography and the soundtrack.

While most of us are used to film as a means of storytelling, Wenders employs film as a mode of philosophy, of mellow observation of the deeper qualities of humanity. That’s not to say that his films are unwatchable or are intimidating and artistic. There is a sense of wry humour and irony that creeps along in each film; we sometimes hear it humming along in the background, and sometimes it just jumps out at the most unexpected places, discreetly and in a non-showy fashion, of course, since Wenders is still more European than American in his directorial sensibility. So when you watch Don’t Come Knocking, all this will hold true for you: the languid pacing, the meditative, taciturn dialogue, the profoundly beautiful camerawork and the unforgettable music – you know what to expect, but the joy is seeing it delivered in an unexpected manner.

While Don’t Come Knocking returns to the setting of Paris, Texas and reprises its opening scene of a cowboy riding off into the desert, everything is different. For one, it turns out that the figure is really an actor, a washed up former Western film star who, after decades of hard living and celebrity scandals and a slow slide to has-been status, has decided to walk off the set of a film so bad that it almost is a parody of all Westerns and The Bridges of Madison County, and had to be financed by a small-time businessman. We will never know why Howard Spence (Sam Shepard) left, but we are treated to half an hour of seeing how this celebrity (however much he is a has-been) manages to pull off and sustain a disappearing trick on his handlers at the production company. Or to appreciate slowly the irony and humour of a man disappearing from the world’s eye by going into the real world, of a man making it difficult to be found in order, perhaps, to find himself. The humour is understated, in the background, and yet sustained over half an hour on just one philosophical joke, will generate tingles in your flesh.

At the same time, Don’t Come Knocking is still a Western. Relentlessly and mercilessly on the heels of the outlaw is some kind of bounty hunter (Tim Roth), a creepy man who speaks ever so politely in clipped syllables and even pays a visit to Mrs Spencer (Eva Marie Saint), a little old lady in Nevada who Howard has never spoken to in more than 20 years. Perhaps he’s fled to the safety of his childhood home. Or perhaps, like outlaws in the movies, Howard has escaped in order to come to terms with the hearts he’s broken – after all, he did have a wild past – and reap the seeds he has sown before he meets (and will surely meet) the bounty hunter.

I liked Wender’s handling of what appears to turn out as Howard’s quest for personal redemption. In the hands of a lesser director, this would turn out to be a preachy, moralising film about the evils of the Hollywood lifestyle, If Howard realises that much of his time was lost in his youth and literally suspended in the endless succession of film shoots, can he regain it? Instead of asking dramatically if Howard can be saved, Wenders gently asks if he could regain that lost time. Instead of asking if Howard’s attempts at rapprochement with an old flame (Jessica Lange) could ever lead to his redemption, Wenders asks with a twinkle in his eye whether how Howard attempts to make up for his lost time is the test of redemption in itself.

First published at incinemas on 17 August 2006

Serenity (2005) DVD

Only for the compleatist

There’s a certain charm about the sci-fi Western, complete with federal authorities pursuing gunslingers, rebels and smugglers in a wild Frontier expanded to a galactic scale. This pulpy mashup genre was a regular fixture in the golden age of sci-fi, appearing in magazines like Amazing Stories and Astounding Science Fiction. It’s a mystery that despite their popularity in print, pure sci-fi Westerns haven’t made an appearance on television at all, aside from enjoyable Japanese animation series Trigun and Cowboy Bebop. As the first live action sci-fi Western on American television, Joss Whedon’s Firefly managed to garner a cult following despite Fox Broadcasting Company cancelling the series before the mid-season mark. Serenity is the big screen resurrection of Firefly, a gift to the legion of fans of the well-written series. With a very limited theatrical worldwide release last year, local fans of Firefly will want to pick up the DVD.

Serenity is both a condensation and continuation of the television series, reintroducing the main cast and setup to new audiences before resuming the plot from the television series. That’s actually a difficult task to handle. As a standalone movie, Whedon must ensure the characters are sufficiently fleshed out and properly introduced, while at the same time preventing existing fans from getting bored while waiting for the plot to catch up with what they already know. Here, I feel the writer-director does more than a serviceable job with his well-paced script. The characters feel the same as their television incarnations (it helps that the entire original cast of Firefly returned for Serenity); they even speak the same way as they did – which is to say all of them communicate in the same snarky teenspeak as characters in Buffy and Angel, other Joss Whedon serials. How you will take to that will vary, depending on your position in the Joss Whedon fandom.

Looks-wise, the sets and overall production value of Serenity resemble a 2-hour TV special of Firefly more than an actual movie. To be sure, Serenity cost USD 39 million, a very low budget for a film, but Firefly was an expensive series (costing an estimated 2 million per episode) that looked far better than this.

The plot of Serenity is serviceable and its twists and turns and clichés are standard Joss Whedon. It ties up most loose ends and unsolved mysteries in the series (I was fuming, however, at where the evil industrialists went to), while leaving a tantalising possibility for a sequel, either on television – something that will please fans to no end. The only other thing that will please them more is the availability of the Firefly DVD set in Singapore.

DVD Extras

Joss Whedon’s film commentary is something that all Firefly fans will appreciate. The director gives very detailed explanations for every scene and every set. Newcomers will find his frequent references to the television series informative, especially if they feel a little lost about the characters or the historical background of the Firefly universe, something plays a big part in the setup, but is too vaguely hinted in this movie.

The high value-addedness of the DVD continues with the deleted scenes, which receive their own commentary from the director – in Dolby 5.1. One gets the feeling that some of these deleted scenes should not have made the cutting board – they do provide the exposition that is important to newcomers to the series, and allow the film to stand on its own legs.

First published at incinemas on 19 April 2006