Development work on FAR WEST continues — to be honest, launch has been delayed by a tightness in Adamant’s budget: we’re only just now starting to see signs of slowly crawling out of a six-month-deep hole, created by a perfect storm of the Borders’ bankruptcy (returns of product) and the failed “app-pricing” experiment (gutting our digital revenues). No spare funds to do the last remaining things needed for the launch until I can get some firmer ground beneath our feet. But it is coming.
Still feeding myself a regular diet of inspirational material — the latest being a chance I had last week to see (in a “see it before its in theatres” preview via HDNet) Takashi Miike’s new film, a return to classic samurai chanbara called 13 Assassins. The plot is a familiar one: Rag-tag team of minor samurai, mercenary ronin, and roguish scamps take the solemn duty upon themselves to kill a powerful lord who is a dangerously cruel madman, thought untouchable because of he’s the Shogun’s younger brother. Duty, honor, sacrifice — the whole jidaigeki shebang.
A trailer:
The inspirations for FAR WEST lean more to the Chinese, rather than the Japanese, but you can’t turn down the opportunity to dip occasionally into wider focus.
The other bit of inspirational news this week comes from the announcement that Quentin Tarantino’s next film (supposedly coming in 2012) will be his take on the Spaghetti Western, under the title DJANGO UNCHAINED, which will take the action to the reconstruction-era South and make Django a liberated slave.
Django is an interesting case — almost a public domain character, thanks to the tradition of Italian films in the 60s and 70s to pretty much directly rip eachother off. After the success of the original DJANGO with Franco Nero:
..literally .dozens of knock-off unofficial “sequels” were made, with Nero look-alikes, all featuring a title character named Django, largely made by Italian and German studios. So to see Tarantino continue the tradition fills my heart with anticipation and not a small amount of glee.
…and yes, we will absolutely be putting a “Django” in FAR WEST.
