Nominee for Palme d'Or at Cannes Film Festival 2005


Review:

Sam Shepard co-writes and stars in Dont Come Knocking, where an aging Western star in a moment of alcohol-fueled realisation deserts the production of his latest film to search down his past in order find a new future. Howard Spence is the quintessential lone ranger, no place to call home and a drugstore cowboy at heart, dependent on booze and women to get him through his days. Blessed with a bevy of talented performers and a seasoned director/co-writer in Wim Wenders, the film doesnt quite live up to the expectations set with Shepard and Wenders last collaboration, Paris, Texas.

Its very much the same sort of endeavour, but theyve lost their edge and the understanding of the painful realisations of lost glory and rediscovered pasts, which they had carefully constructed back then. While the truth of their storytelling might be wavering by contemporary standards, the message does not change in their latest effort. Unfortunately, an over-wrought and glaringly miscalculated script hinders the potential that this film had.

Crafted with an awkward surrealism in the setting and its characters, Wenders puts together a effusively insincere and dreary account of an unsympathetic and constantly inebriated lothario whos motivation is never quite clear to anyone, especially to himself. Bogged down with a screenplay reeking of self-awareness and a discomfited atmosphere of pretension, its a stale study of male menopausal midlife crisis punctuated with obligatory regrets and the exaggerated interpretations of its remnants.......

Continued at:

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Is this really a German film because of Wenders?