Customer Reviews

Sure Fire [VHS]

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Jon Yost may have done it again. Bob Nalwalker is a fresh new actor that will be hard to ignore. His gritty performance as "the sheriff" will leave you breathless. Yost obviously uses Nalwalker as a touchpoint that beautifully ties this movie beginning to end. The humanity he brings to his role is a clever counterpoint to the ramblings of "Wes" played masterfully by Tom Blair. Rural life has never been depicted in such a real yet disturbing manner. Yost sets the viewer free and provides ample time to digest the poignant theme. Fade to black editing is as cutting-edge as it is primative.

This is absolutely the worst DVD I own. The actual film is quite good but for this release World Artists chose to transfer from a video source and the results are close to unwatchable. The image is dark and murky throughout and the poor quality is especially damaging during shots of what are supposed to be beautiful Utah landscapes. I cannot imagine Jon Jost would approve of this.

This is a an excellent low-budget film about a controlling, possibly psychotic Utah businessman and his eventual meltdown and the way it affects his already tenuous relationship with his family.
Interesting in the way it portrays middle America as a place of extreme spiritual and emotional corrosion. Blair is very, very creepy in the lead.

Similar in many ways to Michael Haneke's films in that the focus is extremely narrow and the director's primary statement seems to be about cultural decay.

This is definitely not a film one would watch to be "entertained". But it is quite powerful.

"Sure Fire" is a compelling story about Wes a hunt obsessed entreprenneur living in a small town of Utah. I particularly liked this film because of its pain's taking attention to detail and it's beautiful saturated color photography. I've seen this film both on the big screen where it is a treat and more recently on video where it still works very well and kept me glued to the screen right to the end. It will serve as a great introduction to Jon Jost's work, for this is one of his more accessible and popular pieces, being very dramatic and plot driven. The end will come to you as a complete shock and surprise. Above all this a film about the America we never have a chance to see usually, centering on both the business and family crisis' that effect our main hero Wes, convincingly and chillingly played by the ever versatile Tom Blair. You'll be watching it not just for the great performances and ensemble playing, notable aswell are the creative visuals where landscape becomes an integral part of a classic American story. There's also an affecting and powerful sountrack by Erling Wold.

Fans of the American outdoors and all types of lowlife will have a ball watching this film, which is why this film has quickly become one of my personal favorites in my video collection

SURE FIRE starts out with a couple of middle-aged good ol' boys, Wes and Larry (Tom Blair and Robert Ernst) immersed in a conversation about hunting, which quickly turns to the disappearance of a local girl, Sandra Jean, and jokes about her weight, each chiding the other at one point for being rude but not seeming to notice himself doing the same thing; it's all very casual as is another conversation between four old gents about baseball at the booth behind them. Slowly we notice that Wes is a little better dressed and coiffed than Larry, and more confident; just before leaving he gives Larry a quick bit of financial advice, before asking him to go pick up a gun for him, for his son. Just as he's leaving, the phone rings and is given to sheriff; Sandra Jean it seems has been found, dead.

All of this occurs over about 8 minutes, and in 4 shots, setting up both the formal pattern for the film (mostly long, static shots with a lot of dialogue) and the thematic concern - violence, implied and threatened, and macho posturing. As is usual with Jost we have a lengthy credits sequence, static shots of buildings and natural locations with no humans visible (similar to the later FRAMEUP), punctuated by simple credits. There's one really beautiful shot of a store window that slowly grows more reflective as the sun hits it just right, in a few seconds almost perfectly mirroring the other side of the street. We're in a small western town (in Utah as it turns out), apparently on the thin edge between decay and revitalization; in the next scene we see that Wes is a real estate guy, as he talks to the local bank president about his next scheme, which he'll repeat to his wife with more detail later. Wes is a man with big ideas, plans that can't fail..."sure fire". Larry on the other hand is working a broken-down ranch and barely making it.

This is the basic set-up, and there's not a whole lot more to the early parts of the film; like the other films from the director I've seen, you have to read the scenes pretty closely. We have a scene with the two wives, in which they each talk at the other while staring off in another direction, dispassionately intoning hopes and dreams of other people, meaning themselves, that never went anywhere; we have one scene apiece between the couples. Larry and his wife Ellen seem close to violence and anger, especially when Larry is informed that Wes has paid off some of his outstanding loans, but they also seem to have genuine affection for each other. Wes and Bobbi, on the other hand, are clearly inhabiting different worlds; Wes is intent on his plans and wild future possibilities, including bringing rich Californians up to this obviously in-the-middle-of-nowhere country to buy second homes, oblivious that Bobbi isn't on board anymore -- in his business, or possibly in his life.

Finally, there's a closing hunting sequence, as Wes and his son Phillip are joined by Larry and his friend Ernest; just before this there's a long shot of Wes trying to persuade Larry to join him in his company -- when Larry refuses it's clear that Wes just doesn't get it. This scene is shot with a number of odd optical processes -- rear projection which changes from color to black and white, strange cut-outs behind each character, lighting which makes them look ghostly, etc -- it's all quite disorienting. There are a couple of earlier strange shots in the film that seem to match it -- one of just the highway from a car, shot backwards; one skyward looking at green trees, and a later one of brown trees against a black sky in negative. It's all a cinematic rendition of a breakdown, of winter coming on in the life of...the most fascinating thing is that for quite a while we wonder whether it is Wes or Larry whose life is coming to a crisis. When we find out at the end, the machismo, the implied violence, and the hunt all conspire to tragedy; it's all painfully predictable in a way, and yet Jost's use of off-screen action and the couple of very brief spurts of verbal and physical violence conspire to shock as much as in many more overtly harsh films.

A fascinating and strong film overall; at this point, it's my least-favorite of the those (three) that I've seen -- at 82 minutes, it did feel underdeveloped and fairly simple, though I think that the director is aiming for a lean and pointed effect, and he largely achieves it. The odd stylistic tropes I mentioned that periodically occur like punctuations amidst the typical long, slow shots don't seem quite as artful or readily meaningful as similar effects in FRAMEUP, and the acting apart from the mesmerizing Tom Blair is just OK. But it's still powerful and compelling stuff, and the Jost quest will continue...