ALSO, SOUNDTRACK USES BOLERO IN A CONCLUDING SCENE "TO STUNNING EFFECT"
Kim Jee-woon's thriller The Age of Shadows played out of competition at the Venice Film Festival, and at least two reviews have mentioned Brian De Palma's The Untouchables as inspiration for a train station shootout. And after Femme Fatale, one can't help but wonder if a thriller sequence using Ravel's Bolero isn't also inspired by De Palma. Here are a couple of links, with quotes:
John Bleasdale, Cine Vue
"The murky world of betrayal and counter-betrayal is reminiscent of Jean-Pierre Melville's magnum opus Army of Shadows, but the masterful orchestration of tension also shows the influence of Brian De Palma's The Untouchables. The use of music throughout is excellent with a percussive score mixing with period pieces of jazz and a concluding scene uses Bolero to stunning effect. The Age of Shadows is a bloody and breathtaking piece of filmmaking which confirms that Kim can do pretty much anything."
"Because this is an action movie and no mistake, the only difference being that where most films so described usually build to a single massive setpiece, The Age of Shadows has about seven — maybe ten, if you consider that the whole train section (and of course there’s a train section) is a setpiece that contains about three other setpieces inside itself. Each one of these sequences is delivered like the climax to a Brian de Palma movie (indeed there’s a shootout in a train station that seems to deliberately echo The Untouchables) but there’s also such knotty spy-jinks intrigue going on that at other times it plays like Betrayal on the Orient Express."
(Thanks to Rado!)
Updated: Thursday, September 15, 2016 12:07 AM CDT
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