Red Rock West
The director of The Last Seduction did not spring into existence with his magnum opus. First he did this low key, light noir, set on a small town, in which our lead drops into. And it’s not a remake of Yonjinbo.
I see it as a prequel to a story about a hard-boiled private dick. Our hero starts out as a veteran drifter, someone who tries to live on the straight and narrow but gets stuck in a sticky situation. His faith in humanity keeps faltering until the end, where he turns into a hobo with a spade.
This is a slow burner, and mood is not usually established with dialogue, but the actors pull it off. Nick Cage turns every role he’s in into gold, and Dennis Hopper doesn’t chew enough scenario to screw everything over.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.