FABER AND FABER

Only 23-years-old when he directed his extraordinary début feature Gummo, Harmony Korine has since continued to serve notice that he is the riskiest, most radical young talent in independent US film. This collection of three screenplays displays his defiantly unorthodox approach to film form, as well as the unclassifiable imaginative energy that drives all of his work.

Wim Wenders’ body of work is among the most formidable in modern cinema: Paris Texas, Wings of Desire, The Buena Vista Social Club, The Million Dollar Hotel. And Wenders writes about cinema as passionately as he produces it. This volume collects three previously published books of Wenders’ essays: Emotion Pictures, The Logic of Images, and The Act of Seeing. In them, he discusses his development as a filmmaker from the moment he picked up a camera aged 12, and offers a broader analysis of his guiding passions – rock ‘n’ roll, avant-garde cinema, questions of German identity, and the influence of America.

Swingers is an affectionate, hilarious ode to the fine arts of friendship, bar-hopping and girl-chasing. Told in the hip retro-vernacular of the nineties lounge lizard, it’s the tale of a ‘rat-pack’ of young under-employed actors, hanging out together in Hollywood. Mike is pining for his ex-girlfriend; his suave buddy Trent wants to entice him away from his stuffy apartment and back out among ‘the beautiful babies’ on the club scene.

Set in the appropriately Gothic surroundings of contemporary Edinburgh, Shallow Grave presents a trio of affluent characters whose feckless lives are disrupted when they discover the corpse of their recently arrived flatmate, plus a suitcase bulging with money beneath his bed. The stage is thus set for a morality play about friendship and filthy lucre. The story balances on a knife-edge between ebullience and violence as the forces of destruction gather to claim their greedy victims.

Reservoir Dogs is the story of a heist gone wrong, and how the group of outlaws concerned are subsequently undone in the course of their search for the enemy within.

Quentin Tarantino uses words like bullets and writes with a propulsive energy that is compellingly readable. As always with Tarantino, the style of the storytelling is restlessly inventive, showcasing not only his fine ear for frank and foul-mouthed dialogue but also his grasp of formal structure, comparable to that of the smartest crime novelists.