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Hang 'Em High, Real High!
By Stewart Benypayo
Review of Machiavelli Hangman
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Imagine Quentin Tarantino making a new version of Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity starring Charlie Chaplin. If you imagine it correctly, then you have on your hands the exceptionally funny and impressive Machiavelli Hangman (http://www.hangmanmovie.com). There are so many ways of describing this brilliantly unconventional undertaking written and directed by the talented Shervin Youssefian (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1352346/) that I would feel awfully bad giving it a conventional review.
So I will tell you not what the film is or did or stands for, but everything that it's not. If you have seen some of the other films that came out this year, you would know that there hasn't really been anything exceptional to hit the theatres lately. Of course, we'd like to think that there has been and we haven't really wasted our hard-earned money on material that wasn't worth it. Sure Steven Spielberg's War of the World gave a good performance by Tom Cruise but the ending was ridiculously infantile. Crash was the epitome of what good filmmaking should be but it still lacked that ounce of originality that would have set it aside from those other films. Batman Begins was just ok.
Machiavelli Hangman doesn't repeat itself or hammer all the hints and clues into the audience's brain until it feels like the filmmakers are taking us for complete nimrods. It doesn't leave you open-mouthed at how many curse words can fit in the same line of dialogue. It doesn't stretch a scene for so long, you realize they had to make a late cut to reach the 2hour limit. It doesn't portray characters so wooden that they don't leave the immediate silver screen.
What Machiavelli Hangman is however is a combination of those great films that have engrained themselves into your psyche as if a meteor had hit the surface of your brain. Remember how you felt the first time you watched the shark jump out of the water in Jaws? Or when you watched the US invasion of the coast of Normandy in Saving Private Ryan? Or perhaps Indiana Jones running out of the cave with the giant boulder about to crush him? Ok, so these are all Steven Spielberg films but even he hasn't delivered anything decent in the past decade. This film reinstates my fate in American cinema by reminding me why I go to the theatre time after time. It's to feel the reality in those characters and completely lose myself in the film and not be aware that I have been staring at a rectangular screen for two hours.
This film is grandiose in its intimate context. It brings to the surface the most beautiful and cruel human characteristics to the surface and makes you look inward and reevaluate your own relevance to the larger scheme of things.
About the Author
Stewart Benypayo is a movie reviewer.
Machiavelli Hangman
http://www.hangmanmovie.com
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