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List Price: $29.99Amazon.com's Price: $19.99 You Save: $10.00 (33%)Prices subject to change.
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Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Binding: DVD
Brand: PARAMOUNT PICTURES
EAN: 0097363441748
Format: Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, Widescreen, NTSC
Label: Paramount
Manufacturer: Paramount
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Paramount
Release Date: July 25, 2006
Running Time: 116 minutes
Sales Rank: 15133
Studio: Paramount
Theatrical Release Date: 2006
Editorial Review:
Product Description:
Colin Farrell is Arturo Bandini a young would-be writer who comes to Depression-era Los Angeles to make a name for himself. While there he meets beautiful barmaid Camilla (Salma Hayek) a Mexican immigrant who hopes for a better life by marrying a wealthy American. Both are trying to escape the stigma of their ethnicity in blue-blood California. The passion that arises between them is palpable if they could only set aside their ambitions and submit to it. Oscar-winning screenwriter Robert Towne (Chinatown) directs this outcasts tale of desire in the desert co-starring Donald Sutherland (Pride and Prejudice).System Requirements:Running Time 116 Mins.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: R UPC: 097363441748 Manufacturer No: 344174
Amazon.com:
Adapted from the acclaimed 1939 novel by John Fante, Ask the Dust represents a 30-year labor of love for Robert Towne, the Oscar®-winning screenwriter of Chinatown. It's easy to see why Towne was drawn to Fante's classic tale of ill-fated romance in Depression-era Los Angeles: It's a tenacious, hard-scrabble valentine to Towne's beloved city, to the lonely craft of writing, and to the elusive whims of love. Towne must have been inspired by the challenge of capturing the inner life and outer environs of Fante's literary hero, struggling writer Aturo Bandini (played by Colin Farrell), as he arrives in L.A. circa 1932, sells occasional stories to legendary American Mercury editor H.L. Mencken (heard only in voice-overs provided by film critic Richard Schickel), lives in the seedy Alta Loma hotel in the dusty neighborhood of Bunker Hill (where a fellow resident is played by Donald Sutherland), and falls into a stormy relationship with Camilla (Salma Hayek), a Mexican waitress who shares Bandini's immigrant dreams for a better life in sunny California. There are good times and bad in this passionately combative romance (and Hayek has never been more sensuously appealing onscreen), and Towne has done a perfect job of capturing an arid combination of hope, depression, and artistic ambition, working in fruitful collaboration with celebrated cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (The Black Stallion) on meticulously authentic Depression-era sets built on location (of all places) in South Africa. Ask the Dust never fully succeeds as an emotionally involving drama (the lives of writers are notoriously difficult to translate to film), but there's something undeniably seductive about this curious and great-looking film... and we're not just talking about Farrell and Hayek cavorting naked in the ocean. Even that memorable scene is infused with the threat of broken dreams, as if Towne were reminding us (and himself) that nothing good comes without sacrifice.--Jeff Shannon
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - A MOVIE AS WARM AND SLEEPLESS AS THE SANTA ANAS
All the reviews told the plot, technical analysis, but I hold onto the movie's non-refundable quiver that remains after it is over; I read forbiddingly, without permission, between the lines. That's what I remember in helpless dreams doing Freudian battle with that stupid persistent sunrise; during sleep-walking curious sublinimal marathons that keep me from recognizing the "Do Not Walk" signal at the fatal intersection, or flailing for thoughts from the warm security of my tomb as I try to connect ... Read More
Rating: - UK DVD BETTER ASPECT RATIO
For those of you who can play REGION 2 50hz PAL DVD issues I strongly urge you to go to Amazon UK and get the UK DVD issue. This movie was shot spherical that means full frame. In the USA there is a very stupid policy of insisting on presenting spherical films in 1.85:1 which is too tightly framed. In Europe these films are released on DVD in 1.78:1 which is a perfect native fit for a 16:9 widescreen TV/panel/projector screen. This gives more height with the same width as 1.85:1. You get a better pure ... Read More
Rating: - Does the Dust Have an Answer?
I must admit that I have not read John Fante's novel on which this movie is based. The big question is, did I need to? Ask the Dust as a movie is a delightful little self-contained drama, almost a melodrama if it had not been changed for ever from being that by its ending. It was a film never destined to be a blockbuster or win a Oscar (if that means much anyway). Nevertheless, it is a work of art and while it may lag in places for those of short attention span, if you stay with it, the film is most ... Read More
Rating:  - Original but not great
Set during the depression, Ask the Dust examines what happens when two immigrants expectations of what they want to get out of life changes drastically when they meet each other.
Arutro Bandito (Colin Ferrell) is an Italian American, first generation who moves to LA to write a great novel, a love story. But his experience in life is limited and he finds himself stumped on what he should write about. Flat broke and desperate, he spends his last nickel on a cup of coffee at a diner. There ... Read More
Rating: - IT'S THE STORY OF A YOUNG WRITER WHO WRITES ABOUT A YOUNG WRITER WHO...
Writer-director Robert Towne is responsible for a few first-class screenplays of the last thirty years. For example, he wrote or co-wrote Roman Polanski's Chinatown, Sydney Pollack's The Yakuza and Jack Nicholson's The Two Jakes. Not bad, isn't it ?
I had read the novels of John Fante a few years ago and liked them a lot. Arturo Bandini, John Fante's literary double, is a character one doesn't forget easily and the description of the post WWI Los Angeles was particularly shabby. Now, in my ... Read More
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