whpratt1 This film starts out with Howard Spence, (Sam Shepard) who walks off the set of a Western he was starring in and no one can seem to find him which will cause a great deal of problems for the director and producer. Howard decides to visit his mother after not seeing her for 30 years, Eva Marie Saint plays the role as his mom and gave an outstanding performance. After visiting with his mother she tells Howard that he had a son from a women who came looking for him years ago and this puts an idea in Howard's head to visit the town where she lives. Howard seems to go around in circles with a young girl who follows him everywhere he goes and she carries an urn with her mother's ashes. There is one scene where Howard just sits on a couch which has been thrown out in the street for almost 24 hours while the camera views him for a long long time. The reason this film is depressing is the fact that Howard has abandoned his son and wife and he has to face his past sins and mistakes. The moral of this story is simply, "What you Reap, You Sow". Strange film, but down to earth.

Kahuna-6 If you need a movie to show the absurdities of life, then "Don't Come Knocking" will be the perfect choice. Right off the bat, we have a proposition - the ultimate icon of male virility, a big, strong cowboy, running away. He is not escaping hardship. He is leaving a movie shoot filled with creature comfort, sex and all the drugs he can use. In his first act of atonement (or is it castration?), he gave up his horse, boots and even his spurs. Then he walked in his socks out into the desert.Surely a man suffering a mid-to-late life crisis should deserve some sympathy? But Sam Shepard, who co-wrote the script, didn't cut him any slack. In fact he had done such a good job playing this character, it is strange he wasn't even considered for an Oscar.So he went for a little walkabout in the wilderness. Did he have any vision? From the back of a bus, he saw a man in an electric blue suit wandering along the highway carrying a set of golf clubs.He decided to go home to mum; except for a little inconvenience of not having even called his mother for the last 30 years. In another piece of excellent casting, we see Eva Marie Saint as the forgiving mother. Of course, this is a Wim Wenders movie and mum isn't always as sweet as apple pie.Now in the sanctuary of his mother's home, our cowboy looked back at the follies of his life. The director arranged this in the form of a scrapbook of tabloid's clippings. We are left wondering like the hero on what is true and what is not.But the ranch he had known as a boy is no more. Instead, his hometown had been turned into a frontier casino. He didn't even recognize someone who claimed to be his high school classmate. Disillusioned, our hero fell again. In his movie, he would have ridden off or die in a hail of bullets "Just Like Jesse James". But he was ignominiously arrested and sent home like an errant teenager.In the midst of sorting out what left of his life, his mother let on that he may have had a son out of a movie set fling. Off he went in search.And hot on his heel is a bondsman who had underwritten the movie. The Hollywood template would be a tough muscle man in an action packed chase. Nope, we have Tim Roth in yet another brilliant performance. Just like our hero, our bondsman is a loner. While he may be comfortable in his own cocoon filling out crossword puzzles, he does make feeble attempt to connect. He just yelled out loud into the desert asking if anybody is out there.Into the last third, we have all the players coming in for the showdown.Kiss and make up? Got two. One, in front of a gym with guys on their exercise bikes looking on. The other, a hilarious swipe at the classic screen finale.Gunplay? Yeah, a single shot. In a scene that starts off with a wonderful time lapsed photography of a car in a deserted parking lot, the usual cowboy / Indian drama is inverted onto its head.Don't watch this movie if you can't afford to have it haunting you. It is like a Zen koan, it will just keep buzzing around your brain. Don't believe me, I'm writing this at 5 in the morning.

tedg There aren't many ways to be a screenwriter, ways of delivering a story. There are fewer than the playwright has, though the stories can have more variety and structure. Sam Shepard crossed that line a long time ago. He was lucky at first, because he found a sweet spot where the limits of the portal between the two could have such restrictions that he could write about those restrictions and have them convey as some sort of existential clarity. Since then, he's been more active as a player than a playwright. But in this, he's less an actor than what used to be called a "character actor," meaning there's one type that he is famous for playing, and he just gets plugged in wherever that character is required.It must be extremely depressing to be so limited in your art and know it. The knowing is the hard part and I suppose its easy to see it as a life wasted. So what does someone in this position do? He writes about it. What else is there?So we have a story about an aging character actor who breaks away from acting. He just cannot stand it any more. So he reaches out the family he knows: his mom. And from that he learns of another family, and then a family beyond that. His real-life wife is an actress of some range and ability, someone less intelligent and perhaps as a result more committed and successful. She plays the old, short lived girlfriend he got pregnant during a shoot. Her character, though she is a waitress, is someone successfully in the world and able to cope with loneliness. Sarah Polley is a writer, actress, director who I think has enormous talent, which is a shorthand way of saying that she limits the art rather than the other way around that Shepard has. She plays a third layer of family, a sort of calm anchor, a sort of token of the other extreme from Shepard's character.That's it. That's the structure of this thing. All else are episode that set the fences and paddocks. Its pretty darned effective, if you know what it is, and touching.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

lastliberal On thing you can be certain of when you watch a Wim Wenders (Buena Vista Social Club, Paris, Texas, The End of Violence) is stunning cinematography, a great soundtrack, and an emotional story.Franz Lustig's cinematography in Montana, Utah and Nevada was breathtaking. The shot inside the casino was surreal. I could watch the film with the sound off just to see the pictures.The soundtrack by Bono and T-Bone Burnett was thrilling. Wenders always has great music in his films.Then there is the story. I know exactly what Sam Shepard was feeling. Jessica Lange was super, as she always is. Sarah Polley was a thrill and really made the story. Fairuza Balk was an interesting character that I want to see again.I just like Wim Wenders and he did a great job with this Sam Shepard story.