#Film

Django Unchained is one of my favorite movies of all time ever since I saw it back in 2012. This South-Western revenge flick comes from the legendary filmmaker Quentin Tarantino and offers up some incredible visuals, a truckload of squibs, and some period-correct firearms. One of the armorers on the film was Larry Zanoff and this comes to no surprise as he has worked on some of Hollywood’s biggest films over the last 30 years. 

The Skinner Historic Arms & Militaria Auction held in late October brought unique and rare firearms, as well as very interested buyers. Almost all of the items featured here saw military usage, with one exception being a Colt Python, said to have been used in The Man with the Golden Gun Bond film. Most of the items we’ll cover today went well beyond their estimated worth.

“Well, you gonna pull those pistols or whistle ‘Dixie’?” Moments after delivering this line in the 1976 film “The Outlaw Josey Wales”, Clint Eastwood (playing the titular character) deftly draws a brace of Colt revolvers and opens fire. With assistance from his Cherokee friend, Lone Waite (played by late Chief of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, Dan George), Wales employs his pair of Colts to dispatch a group of Union soldiers who are hesitatingly preparing to attempt to take the infamous outlaw into custody. One of the guns in this iconic scene was an 1847 Walker which is set to be sold at an auction that will be held next month, August 26th-27th.

Dusty Faces, or ‘ Verstaubt sind die Gesichter‘ in the original German, is a new webseries from the German indie production company ParaLight Worx dramatises the experience of German soldiers’ during World War Two. In the video’s description,  ParaLight Worx explain that they aim to tell the personal stories of ordinary German soldiers during the war, relying “on gathered and told experiences to stay as much historically accurate as possible.”

Can a computer pick out and identify guns directly from video footage, without the aid of a human? That’s the technology being demonstrated by a program at the Spanish University of Granada, which earlier this year released a video purporting to show an computer artificial intelligence doing just that. You can see this technology in action in the video released by the University, embedded below:

American Sniper, the Clint Eastwood biography of late Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle, roused a lot of attention among Iraqi audiences, despite the subject matter of US-occupied Iraq. According to the New York Post, the film drew Iraqi cinema patrons in a big way:

Dima Levanchuk emailed me about a firm he is making called The Tramp. It is about a young woman from a small town who turns into a ruthless killer after being kidnapped by human traffickers. At one point during the film she makes a crude blackpower shotgun pistol. You can see her making and firing it in the trailer …