In attempting to create a shock effect of the new within the old, the baby is tossed out with the bathwater. The core pleasures of genre still have to be respected.
Dead Man's Bounty (2007)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:13
Fresh:5
Rotten:8
Average Rating:5/10
Theatrical Release:Oct 19, 2007 Limited
Synopsis:
An allegorical Western, Summer Love literally begins with a bang. With the audience still sitting in darkness, a shot rings out. A man appears on-screen… dressed in black… bleeding… dying. It is...
An allegorical Western, Summer Love literally begins with a bang. With the audience still sitting in darkness, a shot rings out. A man appears on-screen… dressed in black… bleeding… dying. It is THE STRANGER (Karel Roden), a harbinger of death, a nameless catalyst foreshadowing events to come.
As the film unfolds the characters are introduced not by name, but by what they represent. THE WOMAN (Katarzyna Figura) is a fading beauty who can’t quite conceal the scars of her past. THE SHERIFF (Boguslaw Linda) is an alcoholic, lovelorn shell of a man who is literally mutilating himself over losing The Woman. THE BIG MAN (Krzytof Zaleski) is a fat, jealous cohort of The Sheriff who lusts after The Woman.
One day, The Stranger comes to town on horseback with THE WANTED MAN (Val Kilmer) who he retrieved at the site of a massacre in the film’s opening scenes. The Stranger has come to collect the bounty money. He winds up getting roped into playing The Sheriff’s sadistic gambling game and loses The Wanted Man to the gloating Sheriff. Fed up this self-destructive ploy, The Woman storms out of the saloon. Later that night, The Woman in a state of desperation seduces The Stranger. All hell breaks loose after their night of passion. A posse is formed under the Sheriff’s inept leadership and an epic manhunt ensues.
Told in a highly visual style, Summer Love recounts a tale of love, pain, redemption and death. On a surface the story is as old as time: Man looses Woman...Woman wants a new life…Stranger comes to town. Summer Love relies less on dialogue than upon on fast paced, meticulously composed images. They lead the audience into the hearts and minds of the characters creating the visual tableaux that tell their stories.
--© MS Film
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Starring: Boguslaw Linda, Karel Roden, Katarzyna Figura, Val Kilmer
Starring: Boguslaw Linda, Karel Roden, Katarzyna Figura, Val Kilmer
Director: Piotr Uklanski
Director: Piotr Uklanski
Screenwriter: Piotr Uklanski
Producer: Piotr Uklanski, Staffan Ahrenberg, Hamish Skeggs
Composer: India Czajkowska
Studio: MS Films
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Reviews for Dead Man's Bounty
Summer Love is fraught with feverish moods, bold imagination and a devilishly complicated exploration of the genre's iconography. It is also maddeningly paced, often like watching paint dry, albeit paint that's the garish tones of buckets of blood.
It’s an odd, disjointed, but curiously appealing effort that could attain cult status if only for the fact that it’s so incredibly strange.
Uklanski distances himself from the material at every turn, until it's difficult to distinguish the ironist's wit from the cynic's smirk.
Summer Love feels more like a haphazard assembly of loose-knit components, jumbled together with obvious affinity for all varieties of a distinctly American genre.
By eschewing any attempt at storytelling or character development, a film with all of the Western's fecund imagery and putrid fumes still ends up feeling as flat and distant as a gallery wall.
The debut feature of artist Piotr Uklanski alleges to be the first Polish western ... There's no doubt that Uklanski has an eye: the film is full of beautifully composed shots. But that's about the end of its virtues.
This pierogi western disassembles the genre mechanics of the gunslinger movie and makes a Dada collage of its gears and springs.
Summer Love has been called the first Polish western and the first Polish spaghetti western, though the truer description might be the first deconstructed art western.
A mock spaghetti western that manages to be both parody and homage, albeit less western than spaghetti.
'Whatever' is likely to be auds' response to this occasionally engaging but often ineptly made exercise in postmodern irony.
The first Pierogi Western, Summer Love is such an observant sendup of the Spaghetti variety that it falls into the trap of parody in becoming almost too serious for its own good.
Though unevenly paced, the film is a lot of fun to watch as it tries to skew and at the same time re-create the typical archetypes of the western genre.
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