This morning I stumbled upon two movies that are in no way connected to one another, except for both taking their inspiration from Kurosawa’s Rashomon. One is an art film installation, while the other looks like a potential blockbuster to me.

The art film is a work called Klatsassin, a murder mystery created by the Canadian installation artist Stan Douglas and set in the story frame of a western. It is a tale told through 850 individual scenes (over 70 hours of footage) about the events leading to and immediately after an act of murder, with these scenes in the installation playing in a random order over and over again. The film can be seen at the David Zwirner Gallery, New York (525 West 19th Street, Chelsea) until February 10. (source)

The second film is something more conventional, and is called Vantage Point. It tells a story of an attempted assassination of the US president, and does so by giving eyewitness accounts from five different perspectives. The movie, to be released in October this year, stars Forest Whitaker, Matthew Fox, Dennis Quaid, Sigourney Weaver and William Hurt, and is directed by the first-time feature film director Pete Travis and written by the first-time scribe Barry Levy.