Sam Shepard’s revisionist 1994 Western, the final release featuring late actor River Phoenix, combines elements of baroque Japanese ghost films like Onibaba with traditional stylistic conventions of John Ford.

Storyline:
It’s 1873, Indian Territory. Talbot Roe is going mad with grief over losing his Indian wife, Awbonnie. In an effort to save him, his father, Prescott Roe, seeks to purchase the dead wife’s sister, Velada, from the same traveling carnival he acquired Awbonnie. The girls’ father, carnival master Eamon McCree, is willing to do business, but her step-brother, Reeves, protests, putting an end to the negotiation. Desperate, Prescott kidnaps Velada and promises her the means to be rid of her father in return for comforting Talbot out of his obsession. In Talbot’s madness, he guards his wife’s corpse, preventing her from passing to the beyond. As a result, Awbonnie’s ghost begins haunting and cursing everyone involved in the transaction of selling her as a wife. Meanwhile, Reeves and Eamon search the prairie for Velada…

Silent.Tongue.1993.DVDRip.x264-AcK.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 42mn
Size:	1.21 GiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Met
Video
Codec:	x264
Resolution:	712x430 ~> 1010x430
Aspect ratio:	2.35:1
Frame rate:	25.000 fps
Bit rate:	1 498 kb/s
Audio
English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/292ABA2AF430DCA/Silent.Tongue.1993.DVDRip.x264-AcK.mkv

Language(s):English, German, Spanish
Subtitles:German, Spanish, Portuguese

The post Sam Shepard – Silent Tongue (1993) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Adapted by Sluizer from a screenplay written by Jim Barton, the film offers up an offbeat twist on a well-tread story — something akin to Knife in the Water meets The Hills Have Eyes, with the latter’s flesh-eating mutants replaced by a mournful loner who’s part-Native American (the “dark blood” of the title) and altogether horny and weird.
But the “Boy” (Phoenix), as he’s known as, only comes into the picture once married movie stars Harry (Jonathan Pryce) and Buffy (Davis) make their way as sightseers across the Arizona desert in their incongruously large Bentley, only to have it break down in the middle of a deserted nuclear testing ground. When Buffy sees a light in the distance, she treks over to an isolated cabin and, after much huffing and puffing, arrives on Boy’s doorstep and collapses into his open arms.
Such a moment normally would have been followed by what Sluizer describes as a “flesh opening scene” played up for its eroticism, in which Boy would have removed glass splinters from Buffy’s foot. Alas, this and other sequences — essential to such a sexually infused drama — are left to the viewer’s imagination, though the heat between the two characters is palpable from the get-go and only deepens when Harry comes back into the picture and quickly catches wind of their carnal tension.
Even though Boy sends the Bentley off to a local mechanic, he seems to be doing everything to keep the couple stranded in his desert hideout, and he offers plenty of early hints that he might be slightly, if definitely, crazed. We eventually learn that his wife died of cancer and his Hopi grandfather of melancholia, which helps to explain his offbeat gloominess, not to mention an underground atomic bunker he’s decorated with hundreds of Native idols, dusty psychology books and candlelit altars.
But it’s Phoenix’s performance that makes Boy such an intriguingly elusive character, and, not unlike his brother Joaquin’s recent turn in The Master, you never really know what he’s going to do next. This is most evident when Boy takes Harry on a hike in the surrounding cliffs, in a lengthy sequence Phoenix infuses with a mix of strange charm and gun-swinging menace, eventually ditching Harry — only to pick him up later, as he does again later on.
The sequence also is highlighted by stunning exterior cinematography from Ed Lachman (The Virgin Suicides, I’m Not There), which doesn’t feel a day old despite the two decades that have passed since the film was shot. Coupled with that are the convincingly creepy decors, especially Boy’s remote cottage – a hodgepodge of broken wood and atomic spare parts designed by the team of Jan Roefls and the late Ben van Os, both of whom worked extensively with Peter Greenaway, among other auteurs.
Indeed, Dark Blood is one of those slightly loopy and rare items that lies somewhere between Hollywood and the art house, combining the former’s genre know-how and talent (Pryce and Davis also are on point here) with the latter’s eccentricities and penchant for unhappy endings. This is no real surprise coming from Sluizer, whose 1988 Franco-Dutch existential thriller The Vanishing (which he remade, in a lesser studio version, in 1993), tackled similar themes, especially a man’s desire to possess a woman at all costs and the madness that results.
But there’s also something innately tender about what lurks beneath Boy’s lust for Buffy — a tenderness no doubt brought out by Phoenix’s innocent gaze and the foreknowledge that this would be his last role. “I guess you learn that the deepest wounds are self-inflicted,” Harry tells Boy early on, and as this three-way thriller comes to its sad, violent and rather surprising conclusion, his words unfortunately ring true on all levels.

980MB | 1h 23m | 720×460 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/C32BFBB2D734F4D/Dark.Blood.2012.DVDRip.x264-BmP.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post George Sluizer – Dark Blood (2012) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Description: Miranda “no relation” Presley is a singer-songwriter from New York City who comes to Nashville to make it big in country music. As do 10,000 fellow hopefuls. After arriving in the Music City after a long bus ride, Miranda makes her way top the Bluebird Cafe, a local watering hole with a reputation as a showcase for new talent. The bar’s owner, Lucy, takes a shine to the plucky newcomer, and gives her a job as a waitress. Miranda befriends three fellow hopefuls: shy Connecticut cowboy Kyle, Southern belle Linda Lue and James Wright, a cocky Texan with brooding good looks and a tormented artist attitude. A love triangle between Miranda, Kyle and James ensues. Together they embark on a rocky ride down Music city´s well-worn highway of hope, heartbreak and the thing called love.

1.52GB | 1h 54m | 1280×720 | mkv
https://nitro.download/view/01157E4EE3FDC89/The.Thing.Called.Love.1993.720p.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:English

The post Peter Bogdanovich – The Thing Called Love (1993) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Non-normative texts concern themselves with subject matter that is marginalized, or not widely accepted as “normal.” Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho – an ode to the abandoned, and the isolated – is an example. It’s an exercise in brilliant directorial innovation, and cinematic ingenuity – required viewing for the capsized, fissure-ridden heart.

The film offers up a discourse on the fragility, and the emotional and intellectual convolution, of children who are left with the burden of trying to understand why their parents have abandoned them. This search becomes obdurate and lost, in the cases of Mike Waters (a physical and emotional narcoleptic, played to perfection by River Phoenix), and Scott Favor (Keanu Reeves); Mike is subverted by an idyllic yearning for the past, while Scott is consumed by familial regret and rebellion.

We are introduced to the seedy life of the male street-hustler, meeting an interesting cast of characters such as William Richert’s Bob (an aging hustler dubbed the “grandfather” of the streets), and his sidekick, played well by Flea. The surface plot follows Mike and Scott, as one attempts to find his missing mom, while the other plays
“rebel-without-a-cause” to spite his capitalistic, superficial father. Their journey at first invites escapist vice and decadence, leading them through the hustler-dense areas of Portland, Oregon and then to Italy, where Scott meets an idyllic girl who makes him want to lead a normal, straight life, and then on to the trailer park that houses Mike’s biological father, and finally, to a funeral.

The outset of the film sets the metaphoric stage well, as Mike is alone, in the middle of a barren street, equipped with an object that iconographically controls time (a watch), and accompanied by an enduring symbol of innocence (a bunny)… both of which are no longer reliable. Van Sant skilfully externalizes the internal in this opening sequence, with “cinema-of-attraction-shots” (single-shot visuals that resonate, whether or not they’re included in a full-length narrative), like the use of a collapsing house to underscore perverse pleasure, or the jarring sight of a school of salmon swimming against the current. Van Sant builds on this externalizing-of-the-internal throughout the film, with a colour code that exposes the symbiotic relationship between garish reds, which connote heat, passionate-rebellion, liveliness, and danger, with antiseptic whites – representing emotional sterility and blankness. By including handheld camera shots, zooms, tracking-shots, and visuals layered with a musical choice that patronizes American folklore songs, a strong and pertinent social commentary begins… one that asserts the innate fallibility of American values. This commentary bookends the film, as the visual depiction that concludes the proceedings is one of American greed, and callousness… Mike’s fate being the unfortunate sum to life’s harsh equation.

Motifs of America’s need to pledge allegiance to normality (found in references to white-picket fences, pets, and family cars), and the struggle inherent in nature, lend to the film’s brilliance – the freedom experienced by fish is undermined visually throughout the film, as they are swimming backward, or seen in states of ossification as frozen, or as a statue. In the end, Mike is a self-proclaimed, “connoisseur of roads, who’s tasted all different kinds of roads.”

There are many other points of interest that deserve mention; simply said, My Own Private Idaho is a cult-American classic that – like anything cleverly multi-layered – should be surveyed and examined several times in order to fully appreciate how and why this film works as a brilliant piece of art, and entertainment.

https://nitro.download/view/31676168181C2A4/My_Own_Private_Idaho__Criterion_Collection_.avi

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Gus Van Sant – My Own Private Idaho (1991) first appeared on Cinema of the World.