Western Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

October 19, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Mystery, Robert De Niro, Theatrical, Thriller, Western

**½/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons
screenplay by Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese, based on the book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Walter Chaw I think Martin Scorsese is perhaps too principled a filmmaker to indulge in the dark poetry of Killers of the Flower Moon; too bound by limitations he’s aware of and wary of violating, too respectful of the horror of the history to mark it with the crackle of verve and vitality. A sober topic deserves a sober treatment, no question, yet Scorsese at his best is doing lines off the hood of a vintage Impala, not running lines with actors and advisors, all with competing interests and hardwired biases, to find the most cogent, most reasonable way to approach a tripwire. He’s so careful not to set off the powderkeg that is the Osage Murders of 1921-1926 that he doesn’t set off any sparks at all. While I don’t think Scorsese is capable of making a bad movie, with things like Hugo and even The Irishman, he’s shown he can make movies that are enervated in the fatal way of a conversation you have with a beloved elder you’re lucky to engage with but dread, too, for the repetitiveness and dusty formality. I’m not saying Scorsese was the wrong person to adapt white-guy journalist David Grann’s NYT-feted true-crime book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, a celebration of an organization that has done grievous harm to these very people it swooped in belatedly to protect this one time. On the contrary, he’s told what is probably the most palatable version of that story–but it’s a story I don’t want to hear. I guess I’m saying I have a hard time investing much in devalued institutions and their saviours.

Telluride ’21: The Power of the Dog

September 14, 2021****/****, 2021, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, New Zealand, Romance, Streaming, Telluride, UK, Western

****/****
starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons, Kodi Smit-McPhee
written by Jane Campion, based on the novel by Thomas Savage
directed by Jane Campion

by Walter Chaw There is about Jane Campion’s work the air of the poet, and indeed there may be no better interpreter, translator, or adaptor of poetry than another poet. Her body of work is, to a one, in the thrall of the rapture of language: what words are capable of when arranged properly, powerfully. Campion demonstrates mastery of both what is spoken and what is seen, how words delivered with exquisite, just-so composition and deadly-true execution become, at the moment of their sublimation, images in the mind like witchcraft with no physical intervention in between. Music in the eye. Of all the easy and obvious examples in her work–the imagistic, rapturous biography of John Keats (Bright Star), the voice of the voiceless in The Piano, the shockingly immediate illumination of Kiwi author Janet Frame in An Angel at My Table–the one that springs to mind most easily and often when I’m describing Campion’s work is the reaction of New York City English teacher Frankie, played by Meg Ryan, as she contemplates the words of Lorca printed on a literacy campaign poster in a subway car in Campion’s In the Cut. She looks upon them as a sinner looks upon the gallery of saints illuminated in the coloured windows of old cathedrals. Words are a rapture, a vehicle, and Campion, with her training as a painter, proves through the medium of film to be the premier painter of words. Loathe to make such pronouncements, I nonetheless spend most days thinking of Campion as my favourite living director and other days thinking of her as my favourite of all time. She is an artist.

News of the World (2020)

December 20, 20202020, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Streaming, Western

*½/****
starring Tom Hanks, Elizabeth Marvel, Ray McKinnon, Mare Winningham
screenplay by Paul Greengrass and Luke Davies, based on the novel by Paulette Jiles
directed by Paul Greengrass

Please take every precaution if you insist on risking your health and that of others to see this movie in a theatre. Wear a mask (over the nose, too, sport), practise social distancing, and don’t be a dick.

by Walter Chaw It’s a “Spongebob Squarepants” gag, maybe, or something from “Phineas & Ferb”. Some smart, post-modern cartoon. There’ll be a bunch of quick-cuts, several different angles, self-conscious camera movements, and whooshing noises to reveal, at the end of it all, a snail or a sloth moving along glacially. Maybe the punchline is a frog giving out a bored ribbit. This is how Paul Greengrass starts News of the World as well, with Tom Hanks as Captain Jefferson Kidd the bored frog in question. So much sound and fury in the opening moments of the piece, ending with the exciting reveal of Captain Kidd packing his horse to go somewhere. The movie doesn’t get better as it goes along, but it does calm down a little, settling into the comfortable cadence of a frictionless, awards-season prestige piece so aerodynamic it’ll pass right through you without leaving a mark. Like magic. Call it “The Road to Perdition, Anti-Western Edition” and you’d know enough about it to save yourself the fat awards-season runtime.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

March 17, 2020****/****, 1970s, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Robert Altman, Drama, FFC Must-Own, The Criterion Collection, Western

****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A
starring Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Rene Auberjonois, William Devane
screenplay by Robert Altman and Brian McKay, based on the novel McCabe by Edmund Naughton
directed by Robert Altman

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller is, even more than his Nashville, the quintessential American film. The whole of it is in a constant state of construction and reconstruction, a continuous and ever-doomed battle against entropy and that human desire to matter a little before it’s all over too soon. The modern analogue for it is Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, as both films detail the sad lives of entrepreneurs staking a claim for themselves on the frontier at the beginning of America’s potential. The only reward for ambition, unfortunately, is death. Death is the only reward for anything. John McCabe (Warren Beatty) is a swaggering loudmouth in a big fur coat who one day struts into the tiny town of Presbyterian Church, pop. 120 (the majority of those prospectors and illiterate scumbags), lays a cloth across a table in the disgusting saloon of Sheehan (Rene Auberjonois), and proceeds to take the rubes for everything they’re worth. With that cash, he buys three broken-down whores, then lights out for the edge of town, where he starts a company.

Business is good.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)

November 20, 2018****/****, 2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Drama, Musical, Streaming, Theatrical, Western

****/****
starring Tyne Daly, James Franco, Brendan Gleeson, Bill Heck
written and directed by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw The Coen Brothers’ one-shot revival-in-spirit of DC’s “Weird Western Tales,” The Ballad of Buster Scruggs features six narratively-unrelated Old West challenges to genre mythology that are so practically effortless, so technically perfect, that the typical Coen payload of misanthropy and, yes, nihilism lands as particularly caustic. Binding each episode in this, a short-story anthology from our most literary filmmakers, is a conversation about how the American myth of self-actualization is indelibly stained by westward expansion, self-justified by the amoral equivocations of Manifest Destiny. It’s about the lie of American exceptionalism, riffing on and shading stock hero archetypes like the gunfighter, the outlaw, the travelling troubadour, the prospector, the settlers of course, and the bounty hunter. The presentation is all a bit too much: it’s too handsome (Inside Llewyn Davis cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel returns to the fold), too exquisitely choreographed, too…tricky? The moment the brothers frame a POV shot from the inside of a guitar, complete with suddenly-muffled singing and strumming, you realize the movie is maybe having some fun at your expense–that it is maybe, in fact, an asshole. “Misanthrope?” asks Buster (Tim Blake Nelson), reading his crimes off a wanted poster, “I don’t hate my fellow man!” Dressed all in “white duds and pleasant demeanour,” Buster may not be a misanthrope, but he’s definitely an asshole, as well as a psychopath. It’s an efficient, devastating dissection of the Gene Autry/Roy Rogers subgenre of western, in which cherub-faced, potato-bloated cowpokes settle land and cattle disputes, woo big-eyed women, and punctuate their acts of questionable heroism with a nice, wholesome tune. Howard Hawks had something to say about this in his brilliant, subversive Rio Bravo. Now the Coens are having a go.

Big Kill (2018) + The Toybox (2018)

October 20, 20182018, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller, Western

BIG KILL
*/****
starring Christoph Sanders, Jason Patric, Michael Paré, Danny Trejo
written and directed by Scott Martin

The ToyBox
*½/****
starring Mischa Barton, Jeff Denton, Brian Nagel, Denise Richards
screenplay by Jeff Denton
directed by Tom Nagel

Watch The Toybox on iTunes

by Walter Chaw Triple-threat Scott Martin’s Big Kill–he’s the writer/director/co-star of the film–is an old-timey western for people who think Silverado is an old-timey western. Really what it resembles is a distended episode of “Alias Smith & Jones”, where a pair of raffish, well-meaning ne’er-do-wells spend time in various clichés interacting with a stock company of NPCs that populate movies like this. The film opens with irrepressible Travis (Clint Hummel) fucking the daughter of snarling Mexican generalissimo Morales (Danny Trejo, who survives this one), thus inaugurating a boring gunfight between the Mexican army and Travis and his partner, Jake (Martin). Jake wants to know what’s taken Travis so long. Travis wants Jake to know that it’s not “screwing,” it’s “making love.” It’s that kind of movie. They’re chased across the Texas border so that Michael Paré can make a cameo, and then on to the titular town of “Big Kill,” where cityfolk greenhorn Jim (Christoph Sanders) wants to make a new life now that his wife was lost to him in childbirth. When Jim shares that with his buttermilk-scrubbed girlfriend, it sounds an awful lot like his wife was a fetus, but, you know, there you have it.

Hell or High Water (2016) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

February 19, 20182016, 2018, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Thriller, Western

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Jeff Bridges, Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Gil Birmingham
written by Taylor Sheridan
directed by David Mackenzie

by Bryant Frazer Cops and criminals may clash on desolate West Texas landscapes, but late capitalism is the real enemy in Hell or High Water. The film declares its intentions in an elaborate opening shot that follows a weary-looking woman arriving for work in the morning as a 1987 Chevy Camaro circles the parking lot in the background. (Her right wrist is in a brace, probably to fend off carpal-tunnel syndrome, that occupational hazard of retail clerks and bank tellers everywhere.) The camera catches three lines of graffiti on the side of a building–"3 TOURS IN IRAQ BUT NO BAILOUT FOR PEOPLE LIKE US"–as it dollies past before panning around more than 270 degrees to the left and pushing forward as our working woman heads towards the front of the Texas Midland Bank. Clearly visible through an architectural frame-with-a-frame created by the camera move are inlaid brick patterns in the shape of three crosses on a wall across the street. Just like that, director David Mackenzie establishes, first, the idea that the men in that blue Camaro are up to no good; second, the current of economic desperation driving screenwriter Taylor Sheridan's story; and third, the religious posturing that offers an alternative to existential despair, with roadside churches, TV evangelists, and Christian radio offering a relentless white-noise stream of piety on demand to an American underclass with nowhere left to turn.

The Dark Tower (2017)

August 6, 20172017, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi, Stephen King, Theatrical, Western

**/****
starring Idris Elba, Matthew McConaughey, Tom Taylor, Jackie Earle Haley
screenplay by Akiva Goldsman & Jeff Pinkner and Anders Thomas Jensen & Nikolaj Arcel
directed by Nikolaj Arcel

by Walter Chaw If I cared or knew one thing about Stephen King’s revered Dark Tower series, I’d probably really hate this movie in exactly the same way I initially hated Francis Lawrence’s Constantine. I was a devotee of the Vertigo sub-line of DC comics through the early-’90s–the one that produced titles like Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman”, Jamie Delano’s “Animal Man”, Grant Morrison’s “Doom Patrol”, and Delano/Garth Ennis’s “Hellblazer”, which of course formed the basis for Lawrence’s picture. But I don’t. Care about The Dark Tower, that is. For all that King once meant to me as a kid, it and The Stand were two of his epics I could never get into. I missed the window on Tolkien, too. And in not caring and in my complete ignorance, I like Nikolaj Arcel’s The Dark Tower about as much as I like Constantine now, not needing the four or five years to come to terms with how it doesn’t jibe with images and rhythms I’d conjured in my jealous nerd-dom. (I maintain, however, that if they were going to make Constantine a Yank, they should’ve cast Denis Leary.) In The Dark Tower, the main hero is a kid named Jake (Tom Taylor) who, one day, discovers that all those crazy dreams he’s been having, which have led to all those creepy-kid drawings plastering his bedroom walls, are TRUE. Why won’t you listen to Jake, adults? Obviously modelled after the kid in Last Action Hero, Jake dreams of a dark tower that is not Idris Elba that is under attack by the evil Man in Black, who is not Johnny Cash but is named Walter and is played by Matthew McConaughey. My favourite moment in the film is when Walter shows up in Jake’s parents’ kitchen, frying something on the stove, explaining apologetically that where he’s from, there’s no chicken.

The Magnificent 7 (2016)

September 24, 20162016, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Theatrical, Western

**½/****
starring Denzel Washington, Vincent D'Onofrio, Peter Sarsgaard, Chris Pratt
screenplay by Nic Pizzolatto and Richard Wenk
directed by Antoine Fuqua

by Walter Chaw That there isn't more of a conversation around Antoine Fuqua's The Magnificent 7 beyond the usual wag-talk about the relative merits of sequels and remakes speaks to something like cultural progress, for what it's worth. The popular criticism of Star Wars: The Force Awakens is that it's derivative and took "no chances." My response is that the heroes of the film are a young woman, a young black man, and a Guatemalan–all in a franchise that set back the racial conversation by about thirty years with its astonishingly tone-deaf prequel trilogy. The Force Awakens, in other words, took a hell of a lot of chances, particularly in consideration of the vile blowback Paul Feig's Ghostbusters suffered for having the temerity to recast a well-remembered bro-fave with women. The Magnificent 7 takes a few chances as well by recasting John Sturges's well-remembered bro-fave Kurosawa remake with Denzel Washington (in the Yul Brynner lead), Byung-hun Lee (possibly the biggest star in Asia), Tlingit/Koyukon-Athabascan actor Martin Sensmeir, and Mexican actor Manuel Garcia-Rulfo. The press junket made a lot of this multi-culturalism and there's a passing reference to it in most reviews of the picture, but like The Force Awakens, the prevailing attitude is that The Magnificent 7 is derivative and that's that. It is that, but that's not all it is.

The Hateful Eight (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

March 28, 20162015, 2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller, Western

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bruce Dern
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw Quentin Tarantino’s eighth film, The Hateful Eight, features eight hateful people trapped in a small space during a blizzard. The hullabaloo surrounding its release has to do with the production shooting in an extinct widescreen format (70mm anamorphic) and putting up a lot of money so that it can be screened accordingly in select theatres. A few critics have misidentified its vistas as belonging to Wyoming (it was filmed in Telluride, Colorado), which is understandable given that only about five minutes of the 187-minute running-time is spent outside. There hasn’t been a Tarantino feature until this one that I haven’t loved; I believe he is our finest working film critic. He understands things about the movies he pulls from–that certain traditions of Japanese and exploitation filmmaking are strongly feminist, that blaxploitation was initially empowerment before it was instantly gentrified, that the best slave narratives involve legacies of violence, which is why Lalee’s Kin and Django Unchained have a biological connective bridge. I’ve learned more about movies from watching Tarantino than I have from watching Godard, who’s actually trying to teach me something. I think the Kill Bill saga is a remarkable statement about motherhood. I find his dialogue to be distinctive and sometimes exhilarating. I struggled with disliking The Hateful Eight for each of its 187 minutes. It’s the first time I’ve ever understood the popular criticism of Tarantino as self-indulgent, nihilistic, misogynistic, even racist. I don’t agree with every charge, but I do get it now. It’s the first time, too, that I was troubled by a plot point in his film: there’s someone in the piece who hates Mexicans, see, but when we get a flashback to this person engaging with a Mexican, we see that this is a fallacy. I can’t figure out if this was intentional; I fear that it wasn’t. I fear, more, that this is evidence that for the first time Tarantino has lost control of his screenplay. I also finally felt the loss of Sally Menke, who was his Marcia Lucas. I hope it’s not a harbinger of things to come.

The Good Dinosaur (2015); The Revenant (2015); The Hateful Eight (2015)

December 25, 20152015, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Disney, Drama, Family, Mystery, Pixar, Revenge, Theatrical, Thriller, Western

THE GOOD DINOSAUR
***/****
screenplay by Meg LeFauve
directed by Peter Sohn and Bob Peterson

THE REVENANT
***½/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, a bear, angry junketeers
screenplay by Mark L. Smith & Alejandro G. Iñárritu
directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu

THE HATEFUL EIGHT
**/****
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bruce Dern
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw Arlo (voiced by Raymond Ochoa) is the runt in a frontier family of stylized dinosaur herbivores who struggles to live up to the example of towering Poppa (Jeffrey Wright) on the family farmstead. He's clumsy, though, and easily frightened, and when he finds himself incapable of killing a mammalian vermin (Jack Bright), he unwittingly causes the death of his father. Arlo joins forces with the vermin, eventually, dubbing him "Spot" (he's a little orphaned human boy) and relying on him to forage sustenance for him in the wild world outside. Spot, in return, relies upon Arlo for protection in the film's final set-piece as Spot is set upon by a flock of fundamentalist pterodactyls. Pixar's The Good Dinosaur is, in other words, a horror western about a frontier bespotted with monsters and monstrous ideologies, set right there at the liminal space–as all great westerns are–between the old ways and the encroaching new. It's far more disturbing than has generally been acknowledged and, in being disturbing, it offers a tremendous amount of subtext layered onto a deceptively simple story. It posits an Earth where the dinosaur-ending comet misses impact, leading to millions of years of evolved adaptations and ending, as the film begins, with the emergence of homo sapiens on schedule, but skittering around on all fours and howling at their saurian masters. The Good Dinosaur is an existential horrorshow.

Brazilian Western (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

June 2, 20152013, 2015, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Brazil, Crime, Drama, DVD, Romance, Scream/Shout! Factory, Western

Faroeste caboclo
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Felipe Abib, Antonio Calloni, César Troncoso, Marcos Paulo
screenplay by Marcos Bernstein and Victor Atherino
directed by René Sampaio

by Jefferson Robbins If a few things fall too neatly into place in René Sampaio's Brazilian Western–like beautiful Maria Lúcia (Isis Valverde) jumping into bed with fugitive João (Fabrício Boliveira), who just held her at gunpoint in her own bedroom–well, it's a fable. That's meant literally, since the film is adapted from a megahit ballad of roughly the same name: Legāio Urbana's nine-minute barn-burner of calamity, bloodshed, love, and redemption spoke to something in the Brazilian psyche in 1987, charting João de Santo Christo's fatal misadventures with the corrupt forces that kept a boot on the underclass. Sampaio's adaptation has a lot to live up to in that respect, as well as in honouring the western genre to which the title nods. It winds up a Leone-ian Scarface of sorts, although the stakes are different–pot instead of coke, infatuation rather than the will to power, with imbalances of class and race at the forefront.

The Lone Ranger (2013)

July 1, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Superhero, Theatrical, Western

***/****
starring Johnny Depp, Armie Hammer, Tom Wilkinson, Helena Bonham Carter
screenplay by Justin Haythe and Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio
directed by Gore Verbinski

by Walter Chaw What Gore Verbinski's The Lone Ranger
has going for it, in addition to a genuinely ugly streak of nihilism and a
surprisingly high body count, is that it doesn't seek to "darken" its
titular boyscout hero so much as offer that his brand of do-gooderism seems
naïve and ineffectual in the modern conversation. It's the same tactic taken by
Arthur Penn's own picaresque western Little Big Man, the film it most resembles right down to the framing story: an aged narrator
relating his sometimes fanciful tale to a modern chronicler, used to amusing
effect when the plot gets out of hand, Princess Bride-style. It's like a
lot of movies, I guess (including two Simon Wincer westerns, Quigley Down Under
and Lightning Jack), which doesn't mean it's derivative so much as it
means that it plays like any number of satires of the kind of innocence that
made the Lone Ranger character a favourite of impressionable
young Americans for generations. It's more the anachronism of The Brady Bunch Movie than
the update of Man of Steel, in other words–and the better for it, even
if its ultimate message appears to be that the crimson tide has overtaken us,
once and for all, and there's no real room left in the world for the idealism
represented by a hero with a list of creeds, the first of which is that to have
friends one must first be a friend.

Django Unchained (2012) – Combo Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

April 14, 2013****/****, 2012, 2013, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Revenge, Theatrical, Western

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L. Jackson
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw If Inglourious Basterds was an
ambiguous, brilliant indictment of "Jewish vengeance" wrapped in this
impossibly canny exploration of violence through screenwriting, performance,
and love of film, think of Quentin Tarantino's follow-up, Django Unchained, as a glorious continuation of what has become a singular artist's evolving
theme. It demonstrates an absolute command of the medium, of what film can do
when tasked to do more than usual, and it does it by
being some of the finest film criticism of the year. If the
Coens are our best literary critics, then Tarantino is our best film critic cum
sociologist, and his topics, again, are how we understand history through
specific prisms and how violence can be both catharsis and atrocity–often
in the same breath and almost always in the same ways. Consider that this difficult film's most difficult moment comes, as it does in Inglourious Basterds, at the very end, in an unbearably ugly act of violence perpetrated against not the expected slave-owner
antagonist, Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), but his manservant Stephen/Stepin
(Samuel L. Jackson). Consider, too, the idea that vengeance–particularly in
our post-9/11 environment–is the proverbial tiger we've caught by the tail:
our cultural legacy that we try to justify through any means, given that our
ends are so very righteous.

Outland (1981) – Blu-ray Disc

August 6, 20121980s, 2012, Action, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK, Western

***/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Sean Connery, Peter Boyle, Frances Sternhagen, James B. Sikking
written and directed by Peter Hyams

by Jefferson Robbins Has anybody looked at Alan “Laddie” Ladd Jr. as an auteur of U.S. film’s late-’70s/early-’80s science-fiction renaissance? By definition, the auteur theory addresses directors, but producer-execs are inevitably part of a film’s genome–at their worst, barriers to a film’s artistic ambitions, at their best, enablers of daring visions, and often rescuers or champions of interesting failures. Ladd, of course, famously midwifed and defended Star Wars (later Star Wars: Episode IV- A New Hope) while he was president of Fox, and the studio went on to shepherd Alien to theatres during his tenure.¹ His production firm, The Ladd Company, sent forth Blade Runner, the first film to put a Philip K. Dick concept on the screen in addition to being very much its own, deeply influential beast. Some unifiers among these films include introductory crawls or intertitles, situating the audience in a far future or faraway galaxy; grimy or rusty milieux, painting the SF frontier as a sumptuous scrap pile; deep attention to class, with starcraft piloted by hardworking space jockeys in trucker caps; and, as it was pointed out to me on Facebook the other day, a reliance on established fantasy/SF artists (H.R. Giger, Ron Cobb, Moebius) to carry out much of the production design. Building a world costs money, and Ladd signed the checks.²

Unforgiven (1992) – Blu-ray Disc (Digibook)

April 19, 20122012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Clint Eastwood, Western

***/**** | Image A- Sound B Extras B+
starring Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, Richard Harris
screenplay by David Webb Peoples
directed by Clint Eastwood

Even if time and HBO's "Deadwood" have made Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven into something less revisionist and more just a furthering of the Siegel/Leone mythology, the fact remains that the picture's earned its place in the company of other flawed masterpieces like The Searchers and The Man from Laramie. At the time of its release in 1992, as my editor Bill once ably laid out, its pending release was actually seen as a joke, earned at the expense of a trio of legendary, completely-indefensible flops. Its serious-mindedness–what appeared to be an unsentimental accounting for the remorseless bastards Eastwood had parlayed into immortality–therefore took audiences expecting another Heartbreak Ridge, "western edition," by surprise.

Vera Cruz (1954) + The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) (DigiBook) – Blu-ray Discs

September 21, 2011****/****, 1950s, 1970s, 2011, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Clint Eastwood, FFC Must-Own, Western

****/**** Image B- Sound B
starring Burt Lancaster, Denise Darcel, Sarita Monteil, Cesar Romero
screenplay by Roland Kibbee and James R. Webb
directed by Robert Aldrich

****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Clint Eastwood, Chief Dan George, Sondra Locke, John Vernon
screenplay by Phil Kaufman and Sonia Chernus
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Jefferson Robbins One mistake in looking at the U.S. Civil War is to assume it began at Sumter and ended at Appomattox. If the wars of living memory have had such tremendous social and personal repercussions, how much could that war among countrymen have? Western movies, for better and often worse, have plumbed this question in the same way noirs and horror movies inquire about their own present moment. Think about the sheer number of greedy killers and dead-eyed psychopaths required to populate "the West" as we came know it through our cinema; what else but a national trauma could create so many murderers and flush them out to the frontiers.

A Man Called Horse (1970) – Blu-ray Disc

August 24, 20112011, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Western

*½/**** Image B+ Sound B-
starring Richard Harris, Dame Judith Anderson, Jean Gascon, Corinna Tsopei
screenplay by Jack De Witt, based on a story by Dorothy M. Johnson
directed by Elliot Silverstein

by Bryant Frazer Hey, peoples of the world: white guys are awesome! Suppose a white guy–a pasty English lord, let's say–were kidnapped by a bunch of Lakota Sioux. Sure, he might try to escape from captivity once or twice, but after a while he'd be totally cool with it. Instead of whining like a paleface, he'd go out and kill some other Native American people, maybe grab him a scalp or two, and then finally prove himself to his tribe by undergoing a bizarre physical ritual and fucking the chief's sister. Eventually, he'll be the leader of the tribe, rocking a tomahawk and a headband and showing them how to skirmish, English-style.

Cowboys & Aliens (2011)

July 29, 20112011, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, India, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, Thriller, Western

½*/****
starring Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde, Sam Rockwell
screenplay by Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman & Damon Lindelof and Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby
directed by Jon Favreau

by Walter Chaw Let’s be clear: if there were a Hippocratic oath for movies, and there should be, it would be “first, do not suck.” It’s not about any desire for depth in something called Cowboys & Aliens, but rather the hope that the movie achieves some kind of baseline competence without, along the way, tripping off issues it doesn’t have the muscle to address and therefore shouldn’t also try to ride to an illusion of depth. It’s the difference between Brett Ratner using the Holocaust as a plot point in X-Men: The Last Stand and Matthew Vaughn doing the same in X-Men: First Class; I mean, talk about it or not, but if you bring it up, have something to say. So when Cowboys & Aliens director Jon Favreau casts Adam Beach as the adopted–and hated–black-headed stepchild of racist cattle baron Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford, gruffing it up in a role named after the serial killer in Red Dragon), he needs to do better than offer up a noble Redskin who, with his last martyred breath, all but invites his would-be dad to go be white with his real boy, Dolarhyde’s psychotic son Percy (Paul Dano). It’s the message of the film, sort of, where no message was necessary or even welcome–this transformation of Dolarhyde from a rawhide-chewing bastard into a dewy-eyed, dyed-in-the-wool liberal who lowers himself to rescue the chief savage (Raoul Trujillo) after taking a second to complain about the disconnectedness of Yankee leadership in the Union army. It’s enough to root for the South to rise again.

Rango (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

July 5, 20112011, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Western

***/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A-
screenplay by John Logan
directed by Gore Verbinski

by Walter Chaw Before he succumbed to bloat with his two Pirates of the Caribbean sequels, Gore Verbinski struck me as a particularly bright light in American genre pictures. His remake of The Ring and the first Pirates of the Caribbean flick were a one-two step that seemed more indicative of his promise than the not-awful-in-retrospect The Mexican and the awful but not bloated Mousehunt. (Well, okay, it was a little bloated.) When he's right, his stuff plays a lot like South Korea's genre cinema: walking a tightrope between grotesquerie and lightness that happens so seldom outside of Seoul it's fair to wonder if proximity to an entertaining dictator is prerequisite. With the CG-animated, Industrial Light & Magic-assisted Rango, Verbinski teams again with muse Johnny Depp to send up Depp's muse Hunter S. Thompson in what functions as a kind of footnote to both Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Sergio Leone's four-film Spaghetti Western cycle. Unfortunately, it also references Polanski's Chinatown and Verbinski's own concept of an antiseptic purgatory from his endless Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.

True Grit (2010)

December 22, 2010****/****, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coen Brothers, Spielberg, Theatrical, Western

****/****
starring Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, Hailee Steinfeld
screenplay by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen, based on the novel by Charles Portis
directed by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw In exactly the same way they distilled the essence of Cormac McCarthy into an overwhelming, oppressive, animal nihilism in No Country for Old Men, Joel and Ethan Coen have distilled the folksy Americana of Charles Portis into their adaptation of his True Grit. That gift for translation is what made The Odyssey into their collection of regional songs and stories O Brother, Where Art Thou?, what made their Miller's Crossing and Barton Fink (the two films, along with O Brother, that True Grit most resembles) so sure in their genre approximations. More than mimics, the Coens' genius is as interpreters and scholars, able to understand the thrust of not Preston Sturges, but of a Preston Sturges character–of not one book but, miraculously, a body of work. And though True Grit is as literal and faithful an adaptation of the novel as one could hope for, the brilliance of it is that it's captured the immersive feeling of Portis's prose. More than an adaptation, True Grit is an explanation of Portis's work through the agency of an entirely different medium. It suggests that the Coens are like Tarantino's monologue explaining Superman at the end of Kill Bill, Vol. 2: there is in their Fargos and Raising Arizonas sardonic commentary on genre and spectatorship. The big secret is that they are in their way as detached and alien as cultural critics as Cronenberg is as an anthropologist.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

November 15, 2010****/****, 1940s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Mexico, Thriller, Western

****/****
DVD – Image A Sound B+ Extras A+
BD – Image A- Sound A- Extras A
starring Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston, Tim Holt, Bruce Bennett
screenplay by John Huston, based on the novel by B. Traven
directed by John Huston

by Walter Chaw John Ford isn't America's Akira Kurosawa, John Huston is, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, an intimate epic that unfolds against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution, is Huston's Throne of Blood. Huston also draws comparisons to Ernest Hemingway, not just for being a man's man in life, but for his precision and economy in art. There isn't any flab on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre–it's as sleek as a dancer in its waltz between complex character drama on the one side and broad social commentary on the other. There haven't been many better American films (it's Huston's best film next to Fat City and maybe The Misfits, and it boasts of Humphrey Bogart's best performance without question), and when it's spoken of, it's spoken of in terms of one of those films that decided careers in the cinema for generations of filmmakers.

Tombstone (1993) – Blu-ray Disc

October 14, 20101990s, Action, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Western

**/**** Image D+ Sound B- Extras B
starring Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer, Michael Biehn, Charlton Heston
screenplay by Kevin Jarre
directed by George P. Cosmatos

by Jefferson Robbins Achingly traditionalist, with an overstuffed cast, George P. Cosmatos's Tombstone is badly-served by its Old Hollywood instincts. Riding forth during one of those cyclical revivals the western seems to endure every decade, it had the bad fortune to eat the dust of Unforgiven. Clint Eastwood's dolorous drama, concerned to its core with the cost of bloodshed, was a case of an icon reminding us of what Anthony Mann did so well. In Tombstone, Cosmatos (he of Rambo: First Blood Part II fame, remember^*) was handed essentially the same opportunity, but he decided he'd rather be Henry Hathaway.

Flaming Star (1961) – DVD

August 5, 20101960s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD, Western

***½/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Elvis Presley, Dolores Del Rio, John McIntire, Steve Forrest
screenplay by Clair Huffaker and Nunnally Johnson, based on the novel Flaming Lance by Huffaker
directed by Don Siegel

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. In his compulsively readable autobiography A Siegel Film, Flaming Star director Don Siegel recounts a conversation he had with the film's producer, David Weisbart. Told that Elvis Presley has replaced Marlon Fucking Brando as the lead in their Nunnally Johnson-scripted western, a baffled Siegel observes, "He's no Marlon Brando."

"On the other hand, Brando's no Presley," Weisbart retorts, creating a kind of Lewis Carroll logic loop from which the only escape is to concur. Siegel is later ironically relieved to hear that the esteemed Johnson has bailed on the project in protest, as it confirms he's not the only one not taking the recasting lightly.

Django (1966) – Blu-ray Disc

August 3, 20101960s, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Italy, Western

***/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Franco Nero, Loredana Nusciak, José Bódalo, Eduardo Fajardo
screenplay by Sergio Corbucci & Bruno Corbucci and Franco Rossetti
directed by Sergio Corbucci

by Bryant Frazer When Django, the title character and hero of director Sergio Corbucci's seminal spaghetti western, first appears on screen, he's slogging on foot through mud, dragging a coffin behind him. The image is evocative and challenging. In classic American films, western heroes had generally been dignified cowboy types saddled up on strong horses. They were lawmen or simple ranchers with a code of honour. They rode into town in a cloud of dust and plainspoken righteousness backed up by a sharp eye and a six-shooter, and they stood for the endurance of traditional values on a wild frontier.

Django thinks those guys were pussies.