Category Archives: western

No Country for Old Men

Posted on March 24, 2008

Seriously, how did this win the Best Picture, Adapted Screenplay and Director of 2007? Maybe there were subliminal messages embedded in the theatrical or screener version that I missed watching on DVD. The only other reasons I can think of are along the lines of technical excellence, the combination of cast and source material or just that this year was the Coen brothers’ turn. Oscars and movie critics, go figure.

I expect most readers are aware that No Country for Old Men is a period piece (although 1980 is a fairly recent period) about what happens to a West Texas welder (Josh Brolin) after he finds a half dozen dead drug dealers whose merchandise and cash was somehow left behind and leaves the powder but takes off with the $2 million in $100 bills.

On Llewelyn Moss’s trail are sociopath mob muscle Anton Chigurt (Javier Bardem with the modified Dorothy Hamill wedge, won Best Supporting Actor) and nihilistic sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones, who is at last growing into his wrinkles). Moss has no illusions, as soon as he gets back to their rundown trailer home he sends his pretty little wife (Kelly Macdonald) off to her momma and lights out himself. The mob soon realizes Chigurt is not coming back with their cash, should he get to it first, and dispatch several other hunters to find Moss, including a very mellow hitter played by Woody Harrelson.

Frankly, and the Big Guy, who watched with me, seems to agree, this is a strange and bad cinematic expression of Existentialism. Despite the extreme action that occurs none of the characters–at least none of the male characters–feel the need to change expression or body language much.

My take is that the weight of the world lay so heavy on these men that non-essential movement cost too much. Events, good or bad, happen and life goes on and, well, one day you die; sooner, later, everything is of a sameness and none matter.

Of course that raises the question of why any of these men bother. Whether the things that happen to us and around us matter after today or not is a question of import but not really why I watch movies. Exploring big questions is fine–The Wire and, judging from the first two episodes, the new John Adams miniseries do it–but I still expect to be entertained or elevated and Joel and Ethan Coen simply didn’t get close to making that happen.

not recommended

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Legends of the Fall

Posted on January 29, 2008

This Brad Pitt vehicle seems likely to have been greenlit in the wake of Kevin Costner’s stunning Dances With Wolves. Aiming for a similar epic Western revisionist anti-hero result and adding the burgeoning star power of Brad Pitt backed with Anthony Hopkins as well as the fresh beauty of Julia Ormond, the execs at Columbia surely expected similar huge grosses and perhaps a few golden statuettes of their own.

Sadly Legends of the Fall (1994) was not in the same class as its model. Director Ed Zwick, still mainly known at this point for the hit TV series thirtysomething, was a bit too loose with his focus. Pitt’s Tristan had to contend with his father (Hopkins), compete with his two brothers (Aidan Quinn and Henry Thomas) for Ormand’s heart and disappears for a huge chunk of the second act after finding himself unable to deal with his feelings of responsibility for a tragedy that couldn’t, really, have been down to him at all.

This gets mixmastered by frequent narrations voiced by a native American elder and family friend (Gordon Tootoosis). Frankly, a movie that needs this much help explaining the on-screen action probably should have gone back to scriptwriters Susan Shilliday and Bill Witliff for another draft.

The acting is strong enough, though Quinn as usual does little for me, and the wide open territories in Montana where the  Ludlow clan have a ranch, the film’s primary setting, is awesome; that John Toll took the 1995 Oscar for Best Cinematography seem reasonable. Yet I wonder how much better Legends might have been if the younger brother and related subplots had been edited out.

recommended

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The Proposition

Posted on July 4, 2007

Rocker Nick Cave has turned to writing movies instead of songs and he seems to have a decent hand at it. The Proposition (2006) is an Australian western taking place in the late 19th Century, a time when most of that vast land was barely settled, much less under the rule of law.

Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone), long in the service of His Majesty’s Government, has come Down Under to “civilize this land.” He commands a small police force somewhere in the Outback and his current mission is to capture the Burns brothers, who’ve massacred an entire local family in a particularly gruesome fashion.

Stanley’s already captured the younger two, Charlie (Guy Pearce) and Mike (Richard Wilson), and offers Charlie the chance to save his and Mike’s lives if he’ll bring back the eldest, Arthur(Danny Huston), dead or alive. Stanley and Charlie understand that Arthur is the true villain, the ongoing threat to this nascent culture, so Charlie agrees.

Arthur’s camp is hidden in some desolate, rocky hills, easily defended from any approach, a key reason why the captain isn’t anxious to take on the task himself. However, an elderly bounty hunter (played by John Hurt) is willing to risk it; he’s quite drunk when Charlie runs into him at a way station, alone, happy to share stories over booze.

Back in town, a government official called Fletcher (David Wenham) shows up, determined to punish all three brothers for the massacre (and unstated previous atrocities). He’s nonplussed by Captain Stanley’s deal and orders that Mike get 100 lashes first thing in the morning; that many is far more than can be withstood, death a certainty if not immediate.

The acting is very strong and nuanced. Winstone and Pearce, the leads, ably convey their characters’ inability to see life in the sharp divisions imagined by Wenham and Huston. Cave’s dialog is honest and direct, yet not without literary quality.

Director John Hillcoat uses the Outback landscape to great advantage. The terrain is as sparse as the dialog and the glaring sky conveys claustrophobic limits to what is really a nearly unconstrained vastness.

recommended

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Open Range

Posted on May 15, 2005

Geez, been awhile since I watched a whole movie. Possibly Open Range (released in 2003) wasn’t the right choice to break my dry spell. Kevin Costner and Robert Duval are old school cattle drivers, taking advantage of legal permission to graze their herds on open spaces. Or open ranges, that’s probably part of where the title comes from. Trouble comes in the form of a rancher (Michael Gambon) who doesn’t care for the men or the competition.

Costner also directed, using a script by Craig Storper from Lauran Paine’s decades old novel The Open Range Men. As the film opens, Duval, Costner and two younger hands are settling in for the night with a thin tarp sheltering them from a torrential downpour; nothing much happens for the next 20 minutes or so except one of the younger hands, played by man-mountain Abraham Benrubi, heads back to the nearest town for some supplies. When he hasn’t returned a couple of days later the two older men find him in jail, nearly beaten to death.

This is just a warning from Gambon, an Irishman who controls the largest ranch as well as the sheriff and town–you can pretty much picture one of those thin mustache twirlers from the silent picture days and nail this character. Duval immediately understands that his boys better destroy Gambon or leave their herd behind and run away, there won’t be any middle ground.

But neither of them are willing to duck the fight. Costner’s Charley Waite was apparently the Civil War equivalent of a Special Forces soldier though as director he feels no need to specify in which army. Though that might have been 17 years in the past, the stress and skills have lingered–Costner almost seems to making a Vietnam allegory or perhaps a Sopranos western. If there’s a difference, the latter probably uses dark humor to emphasize the hollow core of its characters but Open Range is simply gritty and single-minded.

Is this a good film? Compared to other recent westerns like Eastwood’s Unforgiven or Costner’s own Dances with Wolves, I’d say no. While those two films twist a classic genre into modern psychological expeditions and emphasize the beauty of what we gave up for today’s conveniences, Open Range exploits those conventions and wastes many minutes of screen time in plodding conversations or extended shots of (admittedly) beautiful vistas. The last hour was actually decent and if someone had stepped in to put Costner right this could have been much better.

not recommended

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Once Upon a Time in Mexico

Posted on September 18, 2003

Robert Rodriguez puts aside his spy kiddies and gets back to his adult film series with the third film featuring his guitar playing, gun-toting El Mariachi, Once Upon a Time in Mexico. Antonio Banderas stars, along with Johnny Depp, Willem Dafoe and Selma Hayek and WhereIsHeNow Mickey Rourke in a nice cameo. Most of you will probably be more familiar with 1995′s Desparado, the second film, than with the low-budget indie original El Mariachi.

Writer/director Rodriguez–who also produced, edited and scored OUATIM–got a big budget to make this one and the money’s not hard to see on the screen, plenty of big explosions and wire work fight choreography for sure. The problem is that it’s all show and little substance. I kept thinking ‘This is a very slow moving cartoon’ as it played. There’s too much voiceover, too many flashbacks (including every single seen in which Hayek appears), and too little coherence.

Not recommended

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The Magnificent Seven

Posted on August 17, 2003

There are only seven basic stories for writers to use and Hollywood ranks the Hero’s Tale right at the top; my favorite genre or at least far ahead of Boy Meets Girl. So I was quite interested when TV Guide mentioned that one such film I’d never seen but which has all kinds of great press, 1960′sThe Magnificent Seven, was going to be shown on commercial-free Turner Classic Movies. This is a film that spawned three or four sequels, a couple of variations, and a TV series. One of the last of the classic Hollywood westerns, Magnificent Seven is itself based on a another film, a Japanese classic called Shichinin No Samurai from Akira Kurosawa.

A Mexican village, a few miles on the other side of the Texas border, is hounded year after year by a bandit and his gang until the farmers decide enough’s enough. Riding up to some no name Texas town seeking guns and ammunition, they find instead two brave gunmen (Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen) and hire them instead. The gunfighters recruit four more and a wannabe insists on joining them to make the seven. Once the crew reaches the village, there is only enough time for a little training before the bandidos attack. The story itself is hardly surprising to anyone who’s seen more than three Westerns or really any three decent Hollywood action films.

What makes it stand out so much is that so many elements come together so well. The actors really inhabit the characters, while the script treats the characters with respect rather than as objects to move the plot. The director lets the script breathe and gives the actors space. About the only artificial feeling I got was from the sets, especially the Mexican village, which were a little too obviously built on a tight budget. The villagers are a good example of what I mean; in most movies their characters would have been the objects of condescension but Brynner as the leader of the hired guns talks with them and makes them a part of the plan.

I’m not surprised since the director is John Sturges, who went on to make one of my all time favorites three years later, The Great Escape. And Steve McQueen, when his A game is on, is always a treat. The ending might seem like a bit of a letdown but I saw it as realistic.

Recommended

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American Outlaws

Posted on July 5, 2002

A recent take on the Jesse James story. The script, by Rod Taylor, casts the outlaw gang in a very different light. Returning from losing the Civil War to their farms in Missouri, they find that some railroad baron (Harris Yulin, with a goatee to make himself look evil) has gotten government support to take away their farms. Rejecting the railroad’s offer, they get their farmhouses burned down and Jesse’s mom is killed.

Colin Farrell, so good in Minorty Report, plays James and Scott Caan, who doesn’t bluster as well as his dad at the same age, plays Cole Younger. The two lead the gang in a series of robberies intended to deny the railroad the resources needed to continue driving the rail line through Missouri. Allan Pinkerton, the real one, played by Timothy Dalton with a scraggly beard and Irish accent, is the nasty hardass hired by Yulin to stop them. In the end, of course, he does but really achieves no better than a Pyrrhic victory. Ali Larter, famous for her acrobatic Doritos eating feats, does a fine job of dressing up the screen as Jesse’s love interest and Kathy Bates has a small part as his mom.

Recommended for cable viewing by Western fans

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Shane

Posted on September 1, 2001

In this 1953 Academcy Award nominated film, Alan Ladd plays the loner who walks in and saves the day. George Steven’s Shane is considered one of the quintessential movie westerns pitting ranchers against homesteaders in 1880s Wyoming. This could be simplistic but reaches deep to make the bad guy understandable–although the rancher is shown ordering murders he also gets an excellent speech explaining how he came to his position–and brilliantly uses a young boy to focus us tightly on Ladd’s stoic hero. Hollywood gets its material from elsewhere and in the case of most westerns, that source was Frederick Jackson Turner, a historian who argued that the continuously receding western frontier was the central story of America in the 19th century.

recommended

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Once Upon a Time in China

Posted on August 10, 2001

If you like pure Hong Kong cinematic martial arts, Once Upon a Time in China is not to be missed. The video we watched was dubbed in English, which tends to take away from my enjoyment because the voices are so obviously fake and the dialog is so poorly translated. On a DVD I would have had a choice to use subtitles instead but… This is the first of a trilogy where Jet Li plays Wong Fei-hung. Wong is a healer and martial artist in turn of the century China, reacting to the intrusion of Europeans and Americans into China.

recommended

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