Alicia I love this movie so much

TinsHeadline Touches You

SnoReptilePlenty Memorable, crazy movie

Hayden Kane There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Heres_Johny ***Some Minor Spoilers*** Shotgun Stories takes a while to bust out the shotguns. I was feeling a little itchy waiting. I'll save you the trouble of wondering: it was worth it.This tragic indie-drama focuses on a blood-feud which spirals toward the clash of two sets of half-brothers. Son, played by the underrated Michael Shannon, and his younger brothers, Boy and Kid, were abandoned by their drunken father early in life. After the separation, their father went on to sober up, find Jesus, and raise a Mulligan-family of four brothers born of his second wife. His new family (the Hayes), operate a successful farm, which the reformed father built once he crawled out from the bottle and into Jesus's hands.Son, Boy, and Kid are impoverished - Boy lives in his van, Kid in a tent outside Son's trailer - so it's no surprise that they hate the Hayes and the life their father built for them. Then one night their vengeful mother shows up at Son's house to inform the three brothers that their father is dead.Hitherto we've only seen Son as a quiet, relatively pacifist protagonist. The turning point is when he interrupts the funeral with his brothers in tow, demanding to speak.With all the Hayes family in attendance, he basically calls their father a piece of crap. He caps it off by spitting on the old man's casket.That's when I busted out the popcorn.The second wife intercedes to prevent an outright brawl, and Son and his brothers depart without any violence, but there's not a doubt in my mind that this is only the beginning.  The Hayes brothers, befuddled by grief for the good man they knew as their father, are out for blood, and Son, Boy, and Kid are happily willing to unleash their lifetime of rancor for the man they knew as a violent drunk.Writer-director Jeff Nichol's impressive debut is unmistakably indie in tone and theme. There's a lot of 'negative space' here: a character stares off into the distance, and the audience must decipher a tick of the eyebrow or quirk of the lips. Son's character carries the majority of the weight there: a lesser actor might have sunk the project, but Michael Shannon packs marvelous punch with his limited dialogue, and he manages the 'simple man' affect without seeming dumb. Au contraire. His long pauses and nuanced expression deliver the exact opposite: we see an intelligent man who's slow to speak his mind (and is even something of a doormat when it comes to confrontation) but - once the tension and violence amp up - doesn't hesitate to defend himself and his family.Plot-wise, the violence is brutal and gut-wrenching, but it isn't the focus. The worst of it all occurs off-screen, and the gamble pays off. Shotgun Stories' global themes specifically deglorify violence.Most of us haven't incited a familial feud by spitting on our deadbeat dad's casket, but the themes of senseless division and reckless hate are more prescient than ever. Whether it's Shiites and Sunnis or Republicans and Democrats, we're all too aware of the cultures of division, partisanship, and sectarianism. The viewer will undoubtedly connect to Shotgun Stories and its overarching theme. While you won't find any Juliet to Son's Romeo- besides perhaps his wife, who's just left him at the film's opening scene- there are definite parallels between the age-old Capulet-Montague dynamic. Considering the self-defeatism the film portrays as inherent to such a conflict, one might argue it reaches back to Shakespeare's own source material, the Greek tragedy. The deeper Son and his brothers delve into the conflict brewing with the Hayes clan, the more we come to understand that nothing good can possibly come of it.Besides Shannon, the acting is good but not noteworthy, excepting perhaps Son's wife (Nicole Canerday), the criminal but likable Shampoo (G. Alan Wilkins, an apparent nobody who I'd love to see more from), and Cleaman Hayes (Michael Abbot Jr.). Cleaman's character stands out especially as the single reasonable Hayes brother, and Abbot's acting delivers a convincing portrait of a brother trying to keep the peace but unwilling to let his brothers fight a war on their own.Aside from Cleaman, however, the Hayes closely resemble human-shaped turds. I spent a decent portion of the film hoping Son would go grab that promised shotgun and finish them already, even knowing the film wasn't headed that direction. If I had any major complaint with Shotgun Stories, it's that it didn't fully convince me that the majority of the Hayes didn't deserve to be wiped from the face of the earth, which is clearly not what the film aimed for. Aside from Cleaman, two of the brothers are all but villainized, and the final brother has the screen-presence of a wet noodle. Though Son is the unquestioned protagonist, Nichols wanted me to sympathize with the Hayes brothers as the other side of the same coin, which I simply couldn't do. Regardless of the fact that Son did spit on their daddy's casket, I couldn't see the Hayes as anything but instigators and 'the bad guys' until the end, which was too late a reversal for me to buy in. I'll give Nichols a pass, though, since he met, and sometimes surpassed, the mark he aimed for everywhere else.Overall I'm glad a TRUSTED friend recommend this; otherwise, I might have bailed early on an amazing film. While the themes and acting are powerful, the opening is slow, and I wouldn't recommend it to everyone. It's a little more in-your-head than the average American viewer might want from even a drama. Regardless, I'd stand by it as a recommendation for anyone looking for a character-driven story heavy on themes of family loyalty and the hopelessness of hatred.

darosslfc Shotgun Stories is an indie film written and directed by Jeff Nichols. The writer/director of commercially successful Mud makes his debut with this film. Son Hayes (Michael Shannon), Boy Hayes (Douglas Ligon), and Kid Hayes (Barlow Jacobs) are residents of a small town in Arkansas. They were born to a mother that had hate rooted in her heart and were left by their father who started a new life and a new family in the same town. The film escalates when Son Hayes shows up with his brothers at the funeral of his father and has words about the true nature the man who died. Mark Hayes (Travis Smith), one of the oldest of the Hayes father's new family takes immediate offense and plans retaliation on Son, Boy, and Kid. The film tells the story of the subsequent events that takes place between the two families and the resulting despondency. This small film has a lot more depth than what appears to be the surface. It tells the story of families living in a part of America where few get to see. The struggles and emotions these families experience are expertly conveyed by the film. The cinematography and the score are an excellent supplement to the story. Save this film for a time when you're feeling up to watching a story that will leave you thinking about it for a long time after you view it.

tieman64 "Blockbusters have become the laugh track to our national experiment. The very vacuousness of these films is reassuring, for they ratify for the viewer the presence of a repressive mechanism and offer momentary reprieve from anxiety with this thought: 'Enough money spent can cure anything. You are a member of a country, a part of a system capable of wasting two hundred million dollars on an hour and a half of garbage. You must be somebody.' " – David Mamet "And it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against his brother Abel and slew him." - Genesis, 4:8"Shotgun Stories" was the debut of director Jeff Nichols. The film merges Greek Tragedy (specifically King Lear) with the Southern Gothic genre, but is most interesting for the way it knowingly opposes or subverts traditional Hollywood action-movie mechanics.The plot? A feud erupts between Son, Boy and Kid (those are their names in the film - the plot functions on a purely stripped down, archetypal level) and their four half-brothers. Why they're fighting is not important. Nichols is more interested in chartering both the irrational escalation of violence between the two groups of men, and his audience's predisposition to expecting or desiring violence as a form of conflict resolution.Like a tale torn from the pages of the Old Testament, the film makes references to serpents, blind men, Cain and Abel, divided bloodlines, warring sons, kins, familial bonds and masculine heartache. There's therefore an almost Biblical portentousness to the film. It stars Michael Shannon as Son, the tragic, moral centre of the picture. Shannon's body, riddled with shotgun wounds, suggests learnt rationality and an almost preternatural wisdom borne of past pain. But though he possesses an intelligence and foresight which allows him to see where the film's cycle of violence will end, he is ultimately unable to escape the film's bloody vortex."An eye for an eye leaves us all blind" and "violence begets violence" are common sentiments found in "revenge movies" (and westerns, which the film resembles), but Nichols goes several steps further. He shows the film's violence to be self-perpetuating, short circuits his audience's expectations by constantly cutting away from cathartic violence, forces his audience to question its own programmed behaviour and constructs his tale such that both audience and cast must "outgrow" their basest instincts if they are to "mature". Bizarrely, while Nichols constantly undermines audience expectations, "Shotgun" feels more violent than your typical action movie.Interesting scenes abound: one brother comments that their ghost town feels like it belongs to them whilst another points out that if he owned it, he would "sell this worthless place". The brother's are at once kings and rats, royalty and the forgotten. But the emotional and psychological heft that Nichols injects into these supposedly "smaller moments" is remarkable. From grabbing cards to dismantling a tent, the film's narrative gradually tightens. Rather than build toward violence, though, Nichols structures the film as a series of increasingly contemplative scenes. What you respond to, what you're shocked by, is the sheer weight of each violent contemplation. As in classic Greek tragedy, a Jester or Fool character exists to relate information to the principals. Here the film's unwitting provocateur is a one eyed guy called Shampoo, through whom the film's events spiral out of control, catastrophe literally organically sprouting from a kind of blindness or myopia.Films typically highlight acts of violence whilst underplaying the consequences of violence. Nichols inverts this. Just as it appears as though a character is about to suffer a traumatic injury, Nichols deprives the viewer of the actual image, the certain act. In one climactic moment, just as the viewer has been offered enough visual information to ascertain precisely what is about to occur, Nichols sagely cuts to black. Of course revenge and action tales (even films which purport to be "anti violence", "Unforgiven" for example, a late western) secretly relish violence. Such violence is always treated as an antidote, purgative, underlined and served up as a form of catharsis. But Nichols seems repulsed by the concept of violence being cinematically fetishized, preferring instead to linger on the toll with a sad heart.Truffaut once said that no film which featured war could ever be considered truly antiwar. Cinema has a way of making everything about life, particularly violence, exhilaratingly delirious (even sexual; violence and sex occupy the same space). But time and time again, Nichols denies his audience the catharsis that his on screen characters actively seek. In other words, what the audience is denied and called to meditate upon is precisely which the characters are unable to deny and objectively meditate upon. What we are denied is the very cause of the film's violence.Beyond this, the film is almost sublime in the way it conveys an air of total waste and senselessness. Conversely, it seems as though the prospect of violence is all that can lift these perpetually morose and spiritually exhausted characters out of their squalor and/or apathy. Watch too how Nichol's writes his female characters. They exist firmly outside of the boy's story - in another genre and another world itself - unable to fathom the roiling testosterone. And of course you can extrapolate much more. One can look, for example, at one of the son's actions, his desire to fight, as an attempt to escape the futility of his abysmal life by choosing a pathway to glorified suicide. Likewise, the film's inter-familial war is akin to certain recent global conflicts, unrepairable damage always escalating from a certain point which, when viewed in hindsight, is usually very petty. Incidentally, the film was produced by David Gordon Green, a friend of Nichols. Green is heavily inspired by Terrance Malick, who would produce one of Green's own films. All three directors started off in the Southern Gothic genre. 9/10 - Worth two viewings.

manofgirth I must start by explaining the summary comment. I put this in the DVD at 11:30pm after watching the Superbowl and doing the required beer drinking that goes with that. I was pretty sure I would be re-watching "Shotgun Stories" in the morning as I planned to fall asleep. I was amazed that a very slow moving, no real action to speak of movie did such a great job of keeping my interest up. Kicked it out of the DVD at 1:00am, reminded myself to find out who the star was and see what else he had been in since I do not remember him from anything. Michael Shannon is a great friggin actor. I had no interest at all in "Revolutionary Road" but will see it now just to watch his Oscar nominated work."Shotgun Stories" is well worth the hour and a half. You may find yourselves waiting for something big to happen and then realize it did without the gun play or explosions.