Gunfighter Paradise
Gunfighter Paradise
Gunfighter Paradise: This strange little tale speaks about Stoner (Braz Cubas), an assassin who has recently come back to North Carolina after the death of his mother. The elderly woman left for her son a series of notes, written in a code that will only lead him on a winding journey through hell.
He meets Joel Loftin as well as two self-taught bards who make music about eschatology and engage in verbal sparing bouts. However after a while as Stoner and his new friends spend more time together Stoner begins to lose touch with the physical world and instead concentrates on the voices which he believes emanate from God himself.
Gunfighter Paradise borrows from Joel Coen’s films: the beginning is reminiscent of Fargo (1996, Joel Coen) but as you progress further the narration takes a very sharp switch to O Brother Where Art Thou: Coen, Joel 2000.
Just like cohen before him the director Jethro Waters is always defining the work with religious references and imagery; there is that one choral number standing in a stair case which is just claustrophobic with spiritual energy. The guns are well-placed as per the geographical regions and they are training kids from the age of eleven to be murderers.
Stoner is nothing if not unconventional, making it evident by the way he let two confederate soldiers who were in cowboy outfits into his room to use “the landline.” His brother offers him a way into “the restaurant” business which would have not been the best bet for Stoner however Stoner looks more than happy roaming in the woods looking for animals to cook. There is a god who he wants to fight for taking up the weapon “daddy” made for him.
Stoner is advised to seek help from a specialist but tends to skip her office, there is no time to waste on this “voodoo” crap. Cubas does great as our lead and stems the wind upon the humour, it is dark in its comic nature. Stoner presents some flaming feasts to the audience but this time when recycling his dead cat he decides to try putting gems where the eyes used to be: like the ancient Egyptians did.
There’s also the more mundane one about the colour, to be specific, war paint – a dreadful issue: green and all over his face in expectation this would enable him to assimilate with the background foliage. Gun powder is for those who are willing to buy it rather than for those who can afford to leave gun powder out of the conflict.
There are varied views among people of this world with goes against religion. Someone says to Stoner, God wouldn’t talk to him in this ‘English’ after all; another believes that the Lord is the only thing between a bullet and a song. Everyone, who is anyone, seems to possess a bible. It is only rather difficult to figure out what more besides the one book people have read.
Gunfighter Paradise does not seem to have any pronounced opinions on artillery, I would say it is not particularly stridently anti-gun, but it is clear that Waters rather enjoys mocking the residents of this strange corner of America. And further than that, as in, of course, none of them seems to be too worried about the main rule, because rather, they are all too ready for slaughter. Stoner, on the other hand, is under the influence of a different wave: a ghost of a woman with duck feet.
He locates maternal figure in distant soil and argues which of them is a swimmer will be the survivor. For men, she has always been the only ray of the hope in an overly bloody and masculine world; while everything was invariably handed down to them from their mother and it was easily always a little off or out of focus anyway.
The film director, or rather, the film’s editor, makes several amusing close-ups that help people to understand what is happening in their minds. One of the two men dressed as Confederates looks at Stoner, who is already further away, lost in his own thoughts, and seems rather puzzled. He doesn’t buy it; Yank is famous for his quips — according to him one of his friends who played “Dungeons & Dragons” reported about Southern reenactments to him.
Everybody pictured around them is playing out the scenes how these people seek their personal vendettas — be it shooting targets that are placed somewhere or something quoting the scriptures hoping to talk sense into the insanity that is called life. In a sense, dreams are vampires, and they suck us all in. Gunfighter Paradise World premieres at RiverRun Film Festival.
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- Genre: Comedy, horror, Mystery
- Country: United States
- Director: Jethro Waters
- Cast: Christopher Levoy Bower, Richard Buff, Margarita Cranke
