Lee Egan , played with restraint by Timothy Hutton , wants to pull off a big jewel robbery in Palm Springs. He has been casing a jewelry store where once a year they have two to three million dollars in stones from Russia. To pull it off, he asks his brother and old pro-criminal Roy (Harvey Keitel) to come to town to join his gang for the big heist. Jorge Montana and Skip Kovic (Stephen Dorff) make up the rest of Lee's team. Calm and resolute Jorge needs the money for his wife Rachel (Famke Janssen) and their kids since Jorge has just been sentenced to prison. After the heist , at the trailer park, as Lee and Jorge are counting and dividing the money, Skip guns both of them down. Most of the show , which happens after the jewel theft, consists of an elaborate cat-and-mouse game with Roy and Skip chasing each other. As Roy , Keitel carries the film with the kind of credible performance we've come to expect from him. Keitel always brings an emotional and physical intensity to his roles that is unequaled. Here he is outstanding as Roy Egan-an experienced, complicated thief who never says much . Timothy Hutton turns in a stellar performance, as does the always watchable Famke Janssen as a woman recently widowed by the fall-out from Dorff's betrayal of friends. Thomas Burstyn's dark cinematography does a good job here to capture the city's underbelly. This John Irvin film is a small, hard-edged little gem , full of crisp action and tough minded codes of honor.
Outrage is a 2010 Japanese Yakuza film directed by and starring Takeshi Kitano. Kitano's Outrage exists in an effort to explore the various amounts of violence that can be dispensed in the midst of a Yakuza turf war in the Japanese underworld. The complex plot stars Kitano as Otomo , a mid level mob boss. Otomo's direct loyalties lie with Ikemoto, his gangster-father , an aging gang leader who has formed a formal pact with Murase. This pact has raised the ire of the overall Yakuza Chairman, the highest ranking gangster of them all to whom Ikemoto must answer. The Chairman claims his displeasure comes from the shame of associating with Murase's drug business but it is equally likely that he simply doesn't like these two powerful men creating an alliance that could threaten his own power. Payback and revenge become the order of the day and the control of Ikemoto and Murase's territory is up for grabs and several of the players involved have their eyes on it. As Kitano remarked publicly about his making of Outrage , he is giving the people what they want - no pretense of artistic embellishments, but rather blunt , cruel acts of violence of the professional criminal devoid of any romanticism. Despite the plot complexity , Kitano directs one of his most direct and most violent pictures here.
In the film , two brothers and a sister witness the disappearance of their childhood memories when they must relinquish the family belongings to ensure their deceased mother's succession. Summer Hours (aka L'Heure d'été) a quiet ,carefully observed film by writer-director Oliver Assayas , a former Cahiers du Cinema critic. In a small town, Helene is a family matriarch who has devoted her life to preserving the legacy of her artist uncle. However, while her eldest son , Frederic , wants to preserve her home after her passing, she harbors no such illusions as she prepares her legacy. When she dies, the family gets together again at her home , which is taken care of by Eloise (Isabelle Sadoyan). Jeremie ,the youngest son , lives with his wife and children in China and is about to start a new job in Beijing. He needs the money from the sale of the family heritages to pay for the move. Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) , a successful designer who lives in the United States , is about to get married. She does not see herself returning to France often in the future and so suggests they sell the house. Frederic ,who wants to keep everything , is disappointed to hear of his brother and sister's responses. But Jeremie and Adrienne see themselves as elite members of the global community with no specific ties to any place or culture. Life will go on , with an acknowledgement of loss that will always seem insufficient. Assayas has made a drama that is filled with bittersweet observations about family , memory , money , globalization and transitoriness.
A bunch of young hipsters kidnaps a loving couple and keeps them trapped in a barren landscape. To the sounds of free jazz they are performing various instruments with the couple. Yet, as the film progresses the characters appear to be more like symbols acting out relationships in an allegory rather than part of a narrative. The central male character , played by Atushi Yamatoya ,goes from kidnapped victim ,to escapee ,to killer , to demon and then to oppressor himself. Here both male and female characters go through a range of experiences of erotic pleasure , physical restraint and humiliation. The women characters are seen to be as sexually and violently charged as their male counterparts. Wakamatsu used the format of sexploitation as a way into an exploration of other transgressive acts such as extreme violence and amorality.
Hukkle is a 2002 Hungarian film. It's about the daily life of people in a random village which seems beautiful and harmless , but there is something mysterious going on. It begins with an old man who has hiccups, and takes place in front of his house near a can of milk. He observes the daily habits of the villagers, and the viewer is shown many sequences about different events. Elsewhere ,an old man prepares food and a man goes fishing . Life cycles dominate as Palfi invites us into a cruel world where everything's struggling for survival and everything is liable to be munched on by something else. The cinematography is exquisite and full of surprises . There's also a vague thriller element and some amusing visual humour, but really much of the enjoyment is seeing the interconnectedness of rural life : a frog skims across a pond , before being snapped up by a large fish ,which is hooked by a fisherman and so on.
Gozu is more of a surreal character study in the tradition of David Lynch than a true horror film. Mike takes great delight in introducing what seems like a normal action film or a horror film , then suddenly twisting it into something new. A driver named Minami (Hideki Sone) is out with his Yakuza boss , his "aniki" (brother ) Ozaki . To protect an innocent woman , Minami accidentally kills Ozaki. While trying to figure out what to do with the corpse , then trying to find a phone that works,Ozaki's corpse disappears. Now it's upto Minami to find him while dealing with encounters with all sorts of bizzare people and situations as he tries to do so. Minami begins looking for the corpse with the help of a strange man whose face is half-painted white. Other,increasingly bizzare characters come into the mix , and the story gets weirder and weirder. More than a parade of distorted and strange characters , Gozu's descent into the grotesque is above all the manifestation of protagonist's confusion. As the film progresses , we as viewers get to know about Minami's personality ,in particular his insecurity about his sexual identity and his devotion to Ozaki. As with many of Mike's films, Gozu follows no singular genre or style ; moving freely between the characteristics of illogical comedy , gritty Yakuza thriller , unrequited romance and psychological horror story seemingly simultaneously.
S
ukiyaki Western Django is not the first Japanese western. It is a feast for genre fetishists, a loving and lurid pastiche of the Spaghetti westerns that were themselves lurid pastiches of classic Hollywood cowboy pictures. The title of this western refers to the Japanese dish Sukiyaki , as well as Sergio Corbucci's Spaghetti western film Django. The film contains numerous references both to the historical Genpei war and to wars of the roses, as well as the films Yojimbo and Django. The story deals with a bitter rivalry between two vicious clans- the brutal Heike and the flashy Genji. They have taken over a remote mountain village in a region oddly called "Nevada". A mysterious gun fighter with no name (Ito Hideaki) rides into town and offers his services to the clan who offers to pay him the most. While both clans make interesting bids, the gun fighter rejects both offers and is instead swayed to hold off joining either faction by the town's salon madam , Ruriko. She tells the stranger of how the town was taken over by the clans and how her son , Akira was killed by them. The film was made with a fairly high budget , and it shows. Both set and costume design are awesome. The town is a perfect fusion of the classical western town and medieval Japanese architecture,Buddhist temples alternating with the saloon, the sheriff's office and dilapidated stanles. Sukiyaki Western Django is a feast for the eye ; even the much criticized flashbacks , soaked in oversaturated yellow and green tints , seem to work in its advantage.
