How simple and yet powerful this picture was. I mean it is low-budget, its Jeff Nichols debut picture! But you can't even tell. Its simple and it gets to the point. Most of the story surrounds familiar quarrels and how it unfolds and gets out of control. But the way it captures an aspect of a certain American society is just spot on. The whole mood throughout the entire picture is really down, and gloomy but it still allows you to go along through the movie really sucked into the movie. This film hurts, it is not a feel good movie, but that doesn't matter, its really just about an affect Nichols wanted to achieve and it was so brilliant. This is film is about pain and its so damn beautiful

Shotgun Stories tells the simplest of simple tales, dealing with the progression of an extended family feud – and with a title like that you know it won't be resolved with a game of rock-paper-scissors.If an "Urban" setting is nowadays code inferring "a ghetto" or "poor black" setting, then Shotgun Stories is set in a "Rural" environment in Arkansas, by which I mean "redneck" or "poor white". In fact I don't recall seeing a single non-white person in the film, even in the background – aside from the basketball scenes – is that racist? In any case it's true.By "Poor" I mean that asking to borrow a guy's VCR comes with a cost – of a bag of Doritos.I mean that a guy lives in a tent in the yard of his brother.I mean the other brother lives in a van on the riverfront and spends half the film trying to fix his tapedeck.When a local man dies it obviously impacts the community, especially the man's family – only in this case the deceased had two families both with the name Hayes. It is explained that in his early years the man all refer to as "Pa" ran out on his wife and three young kids, all of whom he treated awfully.The man then found religion and remarried raising four new children in a loving family. (For fairly obvious reasons) the ex raised the three boys to despise their old man and his new family, then as soon as they were old enough she left them to fend for themselves.The jilted lads, all now in their 20s, are named Son, Boy and Kid – seriously, and the film follows proceedings almost exclusively from their point of view.Son is the senior and most successful of the trio, he has his own home and family, though his wife has left taking their son due to Son's gambling issues (but he has a system lady!). Son works at the local fish farm.Boy has no job to speak of, he is the one in the van on the riverfront, and he voluntarily coaches some local boys on a basketball team.Kid lives in a tent in Son's yard, where he is content, he also lives on the fish farm and is romancing a young woman, though he is concerned that his current residence, income and future prospects don't bode well for a successful marriage. He also has a prize mullet.Things come to a head when the three boys crash the funeral that they weren't invited to. Some bitter but carefully chosen words are said and a fracas is narrowly avoided – but not forgotten.The other four more favoured kids, again in their 20s and late teens, feel disrespected and take it upon themselves to "set thangs raaaiiight".Over the next few days warnings are issued, scuffles are started and extinguished, and tensions simmer… then a dog dies.A depressing conclusion was almost inevitable from the early goings of this film, and indeed there is much violence, though not much occurs on screen and surprisingly little of it is related to firearms.It isn't the violence that makes Shotgun Stories so good though, it is the adherence to tone and the performances from all featured actors, Boy is obviously the most reticent about becoming embroiled in proceedings and is in fact a fairly timid man, Kid is a little hotheaded but genuinely concerned for the future.Above it all is Son. With the grim set jaw Buzz Lightyear and almost a Sling Blade mutter, Son walks like an old man and has a furrowed brow reminiscent of Sam Eagle. None of these ingredients seem to suggest "cool" but somehow he manages to exude confidence and capability. Son doesn't talk a lot and when he does he is all business and people – especially his brothers – listen.It is quite fitting that Shotgun Stories has less a finale than a finishing, as events more peter out than rise and build towards a climax. Regardless of the lack of flash or big explosions though this is an excellent character study and a compelling story, and is worthy of greater attention and recognition.Final Rating – 8 / 10. An excellent "little" film. Never have a few days in the life of an extended redneck family seemed more compelling.

"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.

Shotgun Stories is a film that should be better than it is. The material provides any number of story lines to emerge that would be more convincing than what is actually shot. The movie does have one thing going for it: Michael Shannon. Too long has this great actor sat in the background of American film. Seen most recently in the William Friedkin adaptation of Tracy Letts' "Bug," Mr. Shannon has the ability to hide his intentions better than any other actor around. The only reason to keep watching this movie at all is because you're not exactly sure what he's up to. While watching this film, one can't help but notice that it looks an awful lot like a David Gordon Greene movie. That's a nice touch, except when the end credits finally...finally go up it shows that this much better filmmaker is a co-producer. Had Mr. Greene taken the helm of this "family tragedy" it's possible the end result would be a far better affair. One fine scene exits in the movie, and it centers around a monologue delivered believably by Mr. Shannon. The scene is early on in the film and occurs at a funeral, and the tension between the families and the setting alone prepare you for more well written, well acted scenes that involve the same amount of truth as this one. Unfortunately, those scenes never come. Jeff Nichols structures the film into an old fashioned Greek tragedy that pits brother against brother. The grudge between them comes from a deep seeded hatred for one another stemming from none other than their father. Family bonds and morality are tested, and the film does a decent job of showing rural American life. Nichols himself hails from Arkansas and one would think that his interpretation of this lifestyle is accurate. I won't argue that. The homes in which these people live seem believable enough, and the environment seems like a real place, but when anyone other than Shannon opens their mouth the film borders on parody, making us laugh at these men's schemes rather than making us understand them. It is a story in which these men are trapped by their environment and unreconciled hatred. The funeral scene in the beginning was supposed to solve this, but only fueled the fire. When the guns start blazing and the bodies start dropping, the movie falls into ordinary melodramatic garbage that we've been reading since the beginning of time. Michael Shannon deserves better, and perhaps in the upcoming "Revolutionary Road" he'll finally be recognized. "Shotgun Stories" should have done this, but instead leaves the actor desperately trying to carry everyone else on his back, which he does for a while. Someone better get him some icy hot and put him in a good film right away.