Ace in the Hole - MatthewHunt

Rushmore
(Wes Anderson, 1998)
The loopy love triangle at the heart of Anderson's bittersweet comedy consists of a primaryschool
teacher and two guys who don't deserve her: Bill Murray's self-loathing industrialist
and Jason Schwartzman's industrious teenager. Goofy and unexpectedly haunted with pain
and loss, the movie hums along to an invigorating mod-rock soundtrack.
Sabrina Fair
(Billy Wilder, 1954)
One of the all-time great love triangles; chauffeur's daughter Audrey Hepburn, playboy William
Holden, and his businessman brother Humphrey Bogart. Which will she choose? You'll have
to watch it to find out. So unashamedly romantic it's astounding the normally acid-dripping
Billy Wilder had anything to do with it.
Safe
(Todd Haynes, 1995)
Housewife Carol (Julianne Moore) develops a mysterious illness that begins to seem like an
allergy to her very life. As Carol's body dwindles and she falls prey to New Age quackery, she
retreats into increasingly extreme seclusion until she is utterly alone - the devastating final
shot is a masterstroke of raw simplicity.
Salaam Bombay
(Mira Nair, 1988)
Set in Bombay's red light district, against a backdrop of Bollywood's dream-laden billboards,
Nair's ultra-realist debut is a bleak, harrowing offering that chronicled the lives of Bombay's
junkies, prostitutes and homeless. Using real street children as actors Salaam Bombay's
understated reportage feel recalled Satyajit Ray at his best.
Salo
(Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975)
Most viewers of this film will have to turn their heads from the screen at some point - if not all
points. It is one of the most notorious and shocking ever made, replete with scenes of rape,
torture, coprophagy, mutilation and general degradation. It's certainly not a film anyone could
profess to love, and if they did, you'd probably want to recommend them an analyst. But to
dismiss Salo as mere trigger-happy taboo-breaking would be to deny the questions it raises.
Certainly, only an outsider like the Marxist, homosexual Pasolini would even contemplate
adapting the Marquis de Sade's already-infamous 120 Days of Sodom and fusing it with the
last days of Mussolini's fascist regime: Salo was the Italian resort town where Mussolini briefly
set up a government after the Nazis rescued him from the hands of the partisans. The basic
story involves four powerful men - "The Duke", "The Bishop", "The Magistrate", and "The
President" - who round up a group of young peasants, male and female, and subject them to
an onslaught of horrific acts. No conventional narrative is followed: we are offered a series of
tableaux, Sadean discussion interspersed with brutal torture. A blunt political allegory, maybe,
but Salo aims at wider targets: the social rituals we hold dear, human compulsions; greed,
consumption, even corporate culture. It confronts our society in a way few art forms ever have
or will. And as if in a coda to this ultimate act of cinematic brutalisation, Pasolinio himself was
murdered shortly before its release.
Steve Rose
Le Samourai
(Jean Pierre Melville, 1967)
Melville's first film in colour, Le Samourai tracks Alain Delon's doomed assassin through the
Parisian night as he tries to slay the beautiful witness to a botched contract-killing. Ice-cold
and existential, trapped in muted, crepuscular hues, it's as much about mood and tone as
about plot or noir conventions.