Rent Bound (2013)

Give it time - Bound review by MH

It took me a while to get into this and see where it was going, but I'm glad I persisted. Convoluted plot that doesn't really come together until right at the end, but it's worth the wait. I nearly watched it a second time, and then realised that knowing what would happen would tend to spoil the experience rather than enhance it. Recommended.

Life at a Junction - Bound review by CH

A twenty-minute movie which lasts rather longer. Portmanteau, circular plots have long appeared on the screen and in recent times given a vogue by Pulp Fiction. With Bound(also known as The Power of Few, 2013) director Leone Marucci traverses a dramatic New Orleans automobile smash five times, victims and witnesses' lives overlapping.

Among these is somebody holding up a shop counter, a stolen Vatican shroud, an attempt to find illegal goods, a break-out upon a terrifying motorcycle - and two Beckettian hobos (including a very hairy Christopher Walken) who guy a police officer much as the felines did the one in Top Cat. All this takes place to a soundtrack so pulsing that it appears on the point of bursting its artery (blood is a familiar commodity throughout).

Any film could look far different if its camera angles had been differently chosen. The effect of Bound coming at the incident time and again is much like a butterfly's wings causing a typhoon somewhere else on the planet. One small act of kindness could have prevented all this from happening, which leaves on wondering whether that would necessarily have been for the best.

Top Cat was a cartoon, and, in many ways, so is Bound. The characters, including Christian Slater, do not have much opportunity to be anything than, at most two dimensional but the way in which a simple story becomes a plot brings them all a greater interest than would otherwise be the case. Whether it would stand up to a second viewing – let alone five of them – remains to be seen.