Monthly Archives: September, 2011

"It’s immediately apparent that Sergio Leone was operating with a much larger budget this time around. He playfully takes his time setting up Lee Van Cleef’s character as well as Eastwood’s, not kicking the film into gear until a good 20-25 minutes in. But all the signature style evident in Fistful is all the more accentuated here."

"While the film is arguably straightforward and predictable, stylistically, it’s magnificent and beautiful to look at. Leone (here credited as Bob Robertson) was famous for his extreme close-ups and his refreshing take on realism in the genre. A Fistful of Dollars is remarkably violent and realistic in it’s depiction of the West as a vile, violent, and unjust universe."

"It is the kind of film, in other words, which wears its weirdness not just proudly, but as its very reason for being—I’m strange, therefore I am. The point here is not the basic ingredients of plot or character, because the characters are all either stereotypes or ideograms of a sort and the plot gossamer-thin, but the variations on plotlessness and characterlessness."

Anybody wanting any lessons on how to be socially conscious without being too obviously tendentious in portraying a regional struggle in film ought to take notes, because in his full-length debut, The Colors of the Mountain, Colombian filmmaker Carlos César Arbeláez manages just that—an accomplishment made only the more astonishing by the fact that in the film Arbeláez also engages another, equally perilous narrative archetype: the loss of innocence in the face of trauma.

"Midway through the film, Majeed trails off into Michael's re-embracing of his faith upon his return to Pakistan, leaving our musical journeymen behind for quite some time. Though there is some mesmerizing imagery, and a smattering of theological contemplation found on his little tangent, most of it is irrelevant to the overall story."