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Have you seen Rio Bravo? Howard Hawk's response to High Noon where lots of amateurs volunteer to help with the local law enforcement and are turned down as not being competent for the jobs.
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Aug 10, 2020 17:11
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Jack B Nimble posted:Still working slowly through Westerns, saw Cheyenne Autumn last weekend, really not the treatment I was expecting from John Ford. I think it illustrates a real change from his earliest films like Iron Horse and Stagecoach, you can see how his ever present interest in the narrative of the American West is changing as the decades go by. Beautiful landscapes and cinematography, as always. The weirdest part of that one was the German-American Cavalry officer telling people he's "just following orders" when it comes to exterminating the Native Americans. At least, i think that's what the deal was, it's been a while since I've seen it. Seemed a little too on the nose for me.
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Jan 28, 2021 19:12
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B-Rock452 posted:The fact that we haven't gotten a big budget movie about Bass Reeves is insane. Someone needs to get a script to Denzel. I haven't seen Posse in over 20 years, but "unfocused" is how I remember it. Good idea, good performances, but needed to be polished. Another movie in that vein is Quigley Down Under. Tom Selleck stars at Matthew Quigley, an American sharp shooter with an experimental Sharp's rifle that is enticed by Alan Rickman to come to Australia for work. What Rickman doesn't tell Quigley is he's hiring him to shoot Aborigines, who have learned to stay out of standard rifle range. Tom Selleck makes a great western hero and it's a shame that we couldn't have seen Quigley: Up Over instead. He's got the screen presence and attitude, and he's got a unique firearm so he's already half way down the road to being a noteworthy character, but the story doesn't utilise him very well. You can tell the only had Rickman for a couple of days of shooting, all his scenes are on the same set and he barely interacts with Quigley. The Australian countryside is a nice change from the American West, but they don't do alot with it. The Aborigines fill in the role normally held by Native Americans but I can't remember any distinctive characters from them and I'm not even sure any of the Aborigines had lines in English or with subtitles. The biggest problem with the movie is tone. It wants to be a jaunty traditional western with funny music, very cliched Western types, and Tom Selleck would not have been out of place in any 40s or 50s Western. But the movie also has a plot that revolves around Rickman wanting Quigley to shoot any Aborigine he can find and features several scenes of the Aborigines being murdered by Rickman's men. There's also a love interest played by Laura San Giacomo who has gone crazy after smothering her infant son while hiding from Apaches in Texas. Now, you can make a dark western, but Down Under swings to far from one extreme to another and it doesn't quite work. Also, I'm sure there's something Freudian going on about American vs Australian Cowboys, based on this picture.
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Feb 1, 2021 01:54
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The ending showdown is great, I love the little grin Rickman gives, like he appreciates the situation and is happy to go out losing a gunfight to an obviously skilled fast draw.
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Feb 1, 2021 23:09
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Just watched "Run of the Arrow," a Sam Fuller directed western starring Rod Steiger. Steiger plays a Confederate soldier bitter about the end of the war who goes off to live with the Sioux. He's later made to act as a scout for the American Cavalry as they go to build a fort in Indian land. Features Charles Bronson as a Sioux chief, dude was yoked back in the day. Good performance form Steiger, presages his role in Duck, you sucker!, but the movie spends way too much time on apologizing for the Confederacy. His character goes on and on about how the South just wanted its liberty and didn't want to be told what to do by the Union. The movie ends by saying that Lee's surrender was not the death of the South but the birth of the United States. Not surprisingly slavery is never mentioned, and the Klan is only mentioned obliquely. So, good performances, some gnarly violence, and some really annoying takes about the South. It's hard to get away from that kind of whitewashing in the 50s and you still run into it today with movies like Gettysburg and Gods and Generals. I am glad that Tarantino took the piss out of all of that in Django.
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Mar 1, 2021 03:25
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Tried to re-watch The Horse Soldiers today. It's one of the few Civil War movies I can find that has Northern troops as the protagonists, but it still suffers from a lot of Lost Cause BS and too much sympathy for the Southerners. I really don't need to watch a movie that features a Southern Belle and her loyal black slave laying a bunch of guilt on the Union Soldiers for "property damage" while raiding in the south. It's well filmed though, and apparently the movie was truncated after a stuntman died and John Ford lost interest in the picture.
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May 29, 2021 19:01
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Cross posting from Rate the Latest Film You've Seen thread: Anyone want to watch a movie filmed in Australia about a lawman in the post-apocalypse directed by George Miller and featuring Hugh Keays-Byrne? Well, Badlands 2005 is that movie, but it's not that George Miller, it's the George Miller who directed the Man from Snowy River and the movie is a failed TV pilot for ABC. If you thought that the introduction was somewhat cliched and had been done before, you're in luck, this is how the show was as well. It's not terrible, the setting western deserts of the United States have been depopulated due to a severe drought. Now that the technology has caught up to create water in the desert, modern day settlers are moving out to the desert to start a new life, battle the elements, and do all the things that settlers in Old West Movies do. Lewis Smith is a marshal who plays by his own rules, flirts with and has a somewhat antagonistic relationship with his boss, Sharon Stone, and talks down to his android partner played by Miguel Ferrer. Ferrer's character is somewhat like Data, the Terminator, C3-PO, and innumerable other naive androids of the 1980s of the future and is stronger and more intelligent than his human partner, but is also treated like chattel and not really viewed as an equal to the humans. I dig these Old West in the future settings, and this show could have been alright, but it probably would have ended up like Max Headroom, The Highwayman, Firefly, and however many others and canceled after a short first season. The writing never quite lives up to the setting, it's like they have a lot of talented people to make the set dressing and play the parts, but keep recycling the same cliches. People keep going back to this well though, even if there generally isn't a good excuse why everyone starts talking like an old timey prospector. Did I mention the marshal likes to watch old westerns and models himself after his heroes of the silver screen? In the best case you have a series like Justified, which benefited from Elmore Lenard inspiring the show and helping to write several of the episodes. As it is, this felt like something that 100 other movies and shows already tried one way or the other and didn't offer anything too inspiring, though it wasn't horrible, it just wasn't that captivating either. Anyway 2 Stars, check it out! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndGkKlBa3bw
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Jun 9, 2021 17:02
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PTaBTK is worth it just for the Knockin' on Heaven's Door sequence. Great bit of gunplay here, Slim Pickens showing that the way to win a gunfight is to remain calm and take careful aim, and that wild shots can still get ya regardless. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjR7_U2u3sM
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Jun 22, 2021 01:16
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https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102125/?ref_=fn_tt_tt_15 I recently watched a tv movie from 1991 called "Into the Badlands" starring Bruce Dern, Muriel Hemingway, Dylan McDermott, Andrew Robinson, and Helen Hunt. It was OK. It's a sorta supernatural anthology picture set in the Old West with Bruce Dern as a bounty hunter/narrator. Really it felt like the pilot to a series that was never picked up, with Dern playing the role of the Crypt Keeper. The stories are kinda meh, but it looks great in a very late 80s early 90s kinda way, and Dern looks like he stepped off the set of Trigun.    
PeterCat fucked around with this message at 03:52 on Feb 10, 2022 |
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Feb 10, 2022 03:50
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General Dog posted:He looks like Larry David on the poster It works a little better in motion. He also drives around a weird cart full of trophies of his bounties, with a parasol to keep the sun off him. Some pretty good shots of cemeteries as well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2pzRDpaq7Q
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Feb 10, 2022 04:47
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In the name of watching horror westerns, I watched Grim Prairie Tales, starring Brad Dourif and James Earl Jones. It's a horror anthology with a wrap around story that the tales are stories that James Earl Jones and Brad Dourif are telling each other around the campfire. Honestly the dialogue between those two is better than anything in the rest of the stories. The stories are about an old man who desecrates an Indian burial ground and receives his comeuppance, a horseman who encounters a pregnant woman walking along side the road in the country, a group of former Confederates settling out west, and a gunfighter haunted by his last kill. The two that stand out are the middle two. The story of the pregnant woman for the shear WTF-ery of it, and the third for the twist being that the a young woman discovers her dad is a member of the Klan, which, while horrifying, seems a little too real for the movie and is somewhat tonally out of place. I do feel the bridge stories work as a Deadwood prequel, as Dourif plays essentially the same performance as his Doc Cochrane character, and James Earl Jones is enjoyable as a weird curmudgeon. The whole thing is up on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_YWStB1FWw And the segment with the pregnant woman just has to be seen to be believed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skCT-61Mhuk A woman swallows a man whole with her vagina while they're having sex. PeterCat fucked around with this message at 00:40 on Feb 11, 2022 |
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Feb 10, 2022 20:48
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Heavy Metal posted:Just watched Fistful of Dollars for time in at least 10 years, that's a great rewatch. Just blows me away every time. I first rented that on VHS in the 90s, I didn't even realize it's Rated R, wasn't allowed to watch those back then. But those Leone's slipped though! Man, just incredibly cool. The music, the style, the just mindboggling badassness of it. Touching too. Oh lord that's a good movie. Have you seen Leone's other works? I would say that Fistful is the weakest of the Dollars trilogy, and Once Upon a Time in the West is Leone's best work. As far as versions of the story, there were westerns with a high body count before that, and westerns were the hero had to be stealthy, but Leone turned it into something new, a western that doesn't take place in any specific place, just a perfect "western" land. You might enjoy Last Man Standing, a remake of Fistful that stars Bruce Willis and Christopher Walken. It's set during prohibition, but takes place in Texas, so you get this juxtaposition of the gangsters with 1911s and Tommy Guns blasting away at each other in an Old West setting. It's pretty bare bones, but one thing I love as a through line between Yojimbo, Fistful, and Last Man Standing is one of the gangs having a giant henchman as part of the group.
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Feb 11, 2022 08:06
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wesleywillis posted:Whats the deal with the Django Unchained movie? There were a ton of unauthorized sequels to the original Django. Django Unchained is just Tarantino's entry into the canon.
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Feb 19, 2022 06:05
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PeterCat posted:There were a ton of unauthorized sequels to the original Django. Also, one of the fun visual gags in that movie is that Django is wearing the same outfit as Michael Landon wore in Bonanza.
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Feb 21, 2022 01:42
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 23:17 |
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I watched a couple of movies about Jesse James today. The first was "The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid," (1972) starring Cliff Robertson, Robert Duvall, and R. G. Armstrong. It's available for free on Youtube and covers the last raid of the James-Younger gang, which took place in the titular Minnesota town. It draws a contrast between the rational leadership of Cole Younger, played by Robertson, and the revivalist energy of Jesse James, played by Robert Duvall. The fun part of the movie is in how it contrasts the culture of the people of Minnesota from the Southerners. The Southerners are all rural types, close to the land who seem to rely on almost shamanistic rites and superstition, while the the Minnesotans have a local baseball team, complete with uniforms, steam tractors, calliopes, sausages, large Lutheran churches and Scandinavian accents. The people from MN might as well be from another planet compared to the James Gang. When the gang arrives in town to rob the bank, they find that no one deposits their money in the bank due to fears of it being robbed. So the first thing that Cole has to do is convince all the locals to deposit their money in the bank so that he can steal it. He does this by striking up a bargain with the bank manager who is also a shady customer. The other movie was Walter Hill's "The Lone Riders," (1980), which was notable for having several sets of real live brothers play the various outlaw brothers. James and Stacy Keach play the James brothers, Dennis and Randy Quaid the Miller bros, several Carradines as the Youngers, and Christopher and Nicholas Guest as the Ford brothers. This movie is the superior of the 1972 movie in every technical aspect, but frankly it's not as much fun. It's probably true to life as it's very episodic, and does cover the Minnesota raid as well, but it doesn't give you much of a feel for any of the characters other than to say that they did have ties to the local Missouri populace and that Jesse James at least wanted some kind of future beyond bank robbery. Essentially, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid is a movie that's on the side of Cole Younger, while The Lone Riders is on the side of Jesse James, with both movies basically positing the Pinkertons as the real villains of the piece. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xe84iVmrKUM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q03mpak2N1o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Y18SAwz1vI
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May 12, 2022 09:42
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