Spanakopita Western
Starting with the Greeks, Westerns make waves overseas.
By: Henry Cabot Beck 04/01/2007
“I’m going to give you a chance—to die!” Thus teases a trailer on YouTube for a Greek Western made by and starring the Drosos brothers, Vasilis and Zacharias, called No Mercy for the Hunted. The film apparently takes all of its cues from the movies their neighbors to the north and west of them were making 40 years ago, and that includes the dramatic twangy music. No way to tell for certain whether the movie is any good, or even interesting, but the narrator’s voice in the trailer sounds like he’s been living in a time-capsule bathyscaphe beneath 42nd Street since the glorious 1970s, and that at least is pretty entertaining. Good thing it’s in English because my Greek is not so good, but epharisto for asking.
Speaking of overseas Westerns, there do seem to be quite a few either finished or in post-production.
Sukiyaki Django Western
Takashi Miike is possibly the creepiest and, at the same time, most talented director in modern Japanese cinema; he boldly goes where most filmmakers would never even dream of going. His 1999 movie Audition will boil your brain—don’t say I didn’t warn you.
His contribution to the “Masters of Horror” series on Starz, Imprint, was recently pulled from the lineup apparently because it was too raw—even the producer, Mick Garris, who is no stranger to excessive gore and horror, said it was possibly the most disturbing piece of work he had ever seen. Cutting edge, figuratively and literally, is putting it mildly.
Well, Miike has just wrapped Sukiyaki Western Django, which is supposed to hit screens this fall. Apparently Miike used to enjoy Spaghetti Westerns with his father years ago and decided he could reverse, in a sense, what Sergio Leone did when he transfigured the Japanese classic Yojimbo into A Fistful of Dollars.
Sukiyaki Django Western takes place in 12th-century Japan, even though some of the costuming is strictly Billy the Kid. The cast is loaded with top Japanese film stars, but Miike made them study English because the movie will be an English language film. (Maybe he can get some tips from Mel Gibson who directed two films in a row that were not in his native tongue—Aramaic and Aztec.) The capper is that Quentin Tarantino has a part in the movie as a character named Ringo.
Big City
Can’t tell you much about Big City, except that it’s a Western, it’s French, made in Canada, will be released eventually in one market or another sometime in the next year and it’s cast almost entirely with children.
Here’s some more: Somewhere in 1880 or thereabouts, the adults of Big City abandon their town to defend a caravan that is under siege by hostiles, leaving all the kids, a drunk and one other adult (the weak one, their press calls him) in charge.
“From that day on, the weak one becomes sheriff, the old alcoholic, Justice of the Peace, and Big City obtains a Mayor child, a barman child, a grocer child, a carpenter child, etc. ‘But the Indian children will not be long in showing the end of their nose… Big muddles in Big City!’”
I couldn’t have said it better. The director is Djamel Bensalah, and the picture, which looks pretty good, has a website: bigcity-lefilm.com, in French.
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