Dying of the Light
Whaddaya you know, it’s a Paul Schrader film. Of course the protagonist is a jaded older guy, dying, raging at the world for its corruption, greed, general right-wing behaviour. Not as polished as First Reformed, there are too many rants to be accepted as a mainstream affair.
Nic Cage is in his element, playing an erratic, half-demented single sexagenarian, switching semi-randomly between depressive episode, euphoria, and ANGER at the system. The antagonist, a sort of Bin Laden expy (a true believer) is in the same situation, sick with a debilitating disease, stuck on small rooms, watching the Muslim world being equally pillaged and squandered by other corrupt leaders.
This is very pitiful, but it’s a fake ending: instead of letting sleeping dogs lie, the moribund man sends all his men shooting up an hotel with foreigners, and finally our protagonist gets to use that belt buckle knife. Still, it was too much adrenaline, the crash is intense, his dementia flares up and he plows into a truck on his way home.
After 20 years of being sidelined for pursuing an alleged dead man, he gets the whole shebang he was denied before: burial place at Arlington, star on the CIA mural, the whole thing. Not worthy!
Did not know this was disowned by Paul Schrader, will have to seek out his bootleg cut, the one he uploaded to The Pirate Bay himself.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.