City of Ghosts

Draymoney3.0

First time watch- was hoping for a little more James Caan, but the movie is pretty good. Matt Dillon is one of those actors who I feel is pretty underrated. Every time I see him in a film, I look him up to see what he's working on. He's solid here and a pretty good directing effort. I will say this might have the worst performance I've ever seen Stellan Skarsgård give. It's a laughably bad performance and I don't believe it's his fault - he's miscast. Weak miserable cowards is a stretch for him - he's usually a badass and cunning.

Arsaib Gilbert4.0

It wasn’t uncommon for a noir hero to be a sympathetic male figure who committed a crime against his better judgment. When he wasn't deliberately manipulated into doing so by a femme fatale, his internal conflict (postwar PTSD, unresolved Oedipal issues) was portrayed as the chief factor for his actions. In that sense, Matt Dillon in City of Ghosts is a typical noir hero, an insurance company executive who goes on the trail of his boss and father figure after their biggest fraud catches the eyes of the feds. Set largely in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, whose exotic and rugged locations serve as another noir trope, the film is co-written by Wild at Heart (1990) scribe and novelist Barry Gifford but it could easily be mistaken for a Graham Greene adaptation. If it contains a number of characters and situations that seem familiar, the sincerity and conviction with which they are rendered makes their awareness a welcoming virtue. It certainly helps to have the likes of James Caan, Gérard Depardieu and Stellan Skarsgård around to embody them.Directed by Dillon himself (his debut feature), the film’s greatest asset, however, remains its richly atmospheric feel for authentic locations; it certainly doesn’t offer a picture-postcard version of the long-beleaguered place. And the mood is enhanced by an eclectic soundtrack featuring a number of classics from the country’s once-thriving music scene (the subject of a 2014 documentary called Don‘t Think I‘ve Forgotten). This assured and evocative piece of work deserves to be better known than it is.

~findlay

matt dillon is an actor i find so fascinating.hes got that tough teen persona but with an existential sweetness blowing around it that carried over calloused into his later life, like a cousin that went to jail, who you fondly remember letting you beat him on the SNES. when i was young he was the guy out of Theres Something About Mary but as ive grown to watch ALOT of his films recently, i see more and more of the person he picks up from roles and brings along the way. a kind of nomadic lost soul, wandering through ghost towns of type-casts and discarded noirs and shite oscar fodder and all sorts. not too outlandish to be an oddball, not too abrasive to be a diva, not too good to be a main man. he feels like if one of me or my friends became a huge actor on the weekends.City of Ghosts is the only film he's directed and is such a weird thing.its a passion project for a guy in love with an aesthetic of wandering. a timeless purgatory of affectations he clearly romanticises with visuals and music. nostalgic cambodian talismans of art, religion, climate, music, crime, war and culture. but he's clearly also a massive fan of films in general, this being his own lo-budget noir version of Apocalypse Now (and easily better than Only God Forgives, another westerners version of south east asian criminal exoticism but at least City of Ghosts is built on respect). wether or not its good is another thing, but i kind of admire him for being so personal and mysterious with it. it feels sometimes like an unknowns first film, it also sometimes feels like an abel ferrara film well into the 90s where he got bored of new york that month.also, my god, the poster on LB. looks like an even worse version of the Island of Dr Moreau remake with Val. murder it.