With all the scandals and change in today’s film arts, I’ve really been paying attention to A24 and what they are bringing to the market. I came across ” Slow West” the other day On my Apple Tv and saw that it was and A24, so I dove right in.
At the end of the nineteenth century, 16-year-old Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smit-McPhee) journeys across the American frontier in search of the woman he loves. He is joined by Silas (Michael Fassbender), a mysterious traveler, and hotly pursued by an outlaw along the way.
Elegantly shot and often very funny, Slow West exists in a movie prairie somewhere between the Coen brothers’ ice-cold No Country For Old Men and their mud-spattered remake of True Grit. With New Zealand standing in for the old west, it looks rugged and beautiful but still a little… off. That was really just a side effect. People watch it and aren’t immediately familiar with the landscape which adds to the dreamlike, fairytale quality of it.
Slow West has been called psychedelic. The violence of frontier life contrasts with unexpected asides, including a campfire singalong that feels like a continuation, or even prequel, to the Beta Band’s rangy shuffling. When it came to the sound design, the filmmakers were really inspired by the second album by Cypress Hill. They knew how to strip things down to just a few sparse sounds. Nowadays sound designers have a hundred tracks to play with so they fill them all up. they wanted to keep it stripped back like Black Sunday.
A24 is an American independent entertainment company founded on August 20, 2012, by Daniel Katz, David Fenkel, and John Hodges and based in New York City. It specializes in film distribution, and film and television production. Katz, Fenkel and Hodges prior to A24 worked in film and production, before leaving to eventually co-found the company, originally A24 Films, which specialized in film distribution. Starting off moderately in 2013 with A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III, the company’s growth started with the release of Spring Breakers later that year. They became better-known after picking up the U.S. rights to Ex Machina and Room, and worldwide rights to The Witch, growing substantially since then. They entered into deals with DirecTV Cinema and Amazon Prime in late 2013, with some films distributed through them, and the name was shortened to A24 in 2016. As of 2018, the company has received a total of twenty-four Academy Award nominations.
