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'Shotgun Stories' reviewed in NY Times



With two nice pics of G. Alan Wilkins!

Here's a preview of the forthcoming movie poster blurb: "['Shotgun Stories'] is a here-and-now American potboiler and a stripped-down parable that can be appreciated by any culture."

Here are some more nice bits.

Much of the film’s ensuing violence is staged obliquely or kept off camera, but it’s still shocking because of its juxtaposition with mundane images of daily life. Childish insults, cruel pranks and awkward assaults coexist with middle-school basketball practices and trips to the grocery store and carwash. The feud’s main players know they’d all be better off if they stopped fighting, but they keep sabotaging peace offerings with huffy macho taunts.

Mr. Nichols and his cinematographer, Adam Stone — the longtime second-unit photographer for the filmmaker David Gordon Green, who helped produce “Shotgun Stories” — often frame their tortured, self-destructive characters within wide shots of depopulated streets, verdant fields and placid bodies of water, acknowledging the beauty these men are too self-involved by rage to see.

The cast’s detailed but subtle performances deepen Mr. Nichols’s characters in ways that become clear only upon second viewing. Mr. Shannon’s constricted line readings and prematurely aged gait suggest the patriarchal burdens that Son bears without complaint. Mr. Ligon’s performance as the slobbish, amiable, easily flustered Boy is the film’s moral center. Shambling through the film’s final third, his bruised face squashed atop a neck brace, he’s a battered Everyman, torn between decency and hate.

Via the NY Times.

The film opens today at the IFC Center in NYC. More national release dates after the jump.

IFC Center New York NY 3/26 +
Wisconsin Film Festival Madison WI 4/3-4/6
Sundance Kabuki Cinemas 8 San Francisco CA 4/4 +
Laemmle's Sunset 5 Los Angeles CA 4/11 +
Northwest Film Forum Seattle WA 5/9 +
Starz Film Center Denver CO 5/16 +
Olympia Film Society Capitol Theater Olympia WA 5/24- 5/29

Posted by Lindsey Millar on March 26, 2008 11:10 AM |

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