Salt

Recapping Cinequest 22

by

San Jose’s Cinequest 22 film festival has ended.  For me, Cinequest 22 meant seeing 17 features, a short and several interviews and Q&As with filmmakers – all including several world and US premieres.  I saw my share of American films, but I also saw movies from China, Spain, Belgium, the Slovak Republic, Argentina, Hungary, Russia, Sweden and Norway.

Among the festival crowd, movies about overcoming disability and disease seemed to be the most popular.  I generally preferred the comedies and romances that prove that it is still possible to write a good movie in those genres.

I especially liked two of the biggest movies in the festival:  the zany Chinese action film Let the Bullets Fly and the drama about the American education system Detachment (I’ll be commenting on Detachment on Wednesday before its release this weekend).

There were some smaller films that I hope gain distribution:  King Curling, the Norwegian comedy about a curling star who must go off his psych meds to win the big match; the Argentine modern-day spaghetti western Salt; and the hipster screwball comedy Percival’s Big Night.  If given the chance to see these films, American audiences will love them.

Here’s the trailer for King Curling.

 

 

 

Cinequest – Salt: the best spaghetti western this year

by

I love spaghetti westerns and so does the protagonist of Salt (Sal), a would-be screenwriter who must have the only cat in Spain named Clint.  He has written a movie set in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the driest place on earth, but nobody else thinks it’s any good.  When he decides to visit the Atacama to improve his script, he is mistaken by all the locals for someone else – the guy who had cuckolded the local crime boss.  That first night in Chile, he is plunged into a real life shoot em up and is soon experiencing a story that Sergio Leone himself would have loved to film.

Much of the fun is in the fact that our hero has never shot a gun or been shot at, and he doesn’t take easily to either – he’s no Clint, for sure.   Salt is filmed in the style of a modern-day spaghetti western and comes with its own spaghetti western score with jangly guitar and jarring harmonica.  If you love A Fistful of Dollars, this is the movie for you.  Even if you don’t love the spaghetti western, you’ll find this a satisfyingly funny movie.

I attended the North American premiere of Salt at Cinequest 22.