Film is Pwn

Starring: Klinton Spilsbury, Michael Horse, Christopher Lloyd, Jason Robards
Directed By: William A. Fraker

I think that whoever proposed re-launching the Lone Ranger franchise with 1981’s The Legend of the Lone Rangerhad a good idea. Of course, the path to bankruptcy is paved with good ideas.  New Coke was a good idea . . . if people liked the product.   Parents and grandparents grew up with the iconic Old West hero the Lone Ranger on TV or on radio.  Presumably those parental units would be excited to take their little consumers to the theater to enjoy a family friendly, PG adventure featuring the Lone Ranger.  On the drawing board it was so great: We’ll have old fashioned stunt work, horses, clearly defined heroes and villains, a moral and upright protagonist with a clear sense of right and wrong, and it’ll be awesome!  Oh, it all looked so promising.

Here is where the idea goes flying horribly off the track: Every single element after the green light ranging from casting to script to filming to catering.  The Legend of the Lone Ranger does not meander toward the wretched film abyss, it gallops blindfolded straight into the hall of awful at a brisk gallop shouting “Hi yo, Silver!” all the way to the bottom of that gorge of film infamy. (more…)

I must confess that I have been in a bit of a film funk of late.  My movie consumption intake has dropped from around 1 film per 2 days to something akin to 1 film every 2 weeks.  No movie has lured me to the multiplex since The Book of Eli (although Cop Out was tempting . . .).

I recently started to watch recent DVD releases District 9 and Where the Wild Things Are, and at the halfway point gave up due to disinterest.  I’m not saying either is bad, just I could not be bothered to sit through them as my mind wandered to distant lands where unicorns roam free and magic bears ride them to the Honeycomb Hideout.

Since the Asylum is kind enough to send Film is Pwn HQ advance copies of their DVDs (thanks, Asylum!), I feel somewhat obliged to screen them and write them up.  I feel it is important to provide this up front disclaimer to my review: Watching the Asylum’s latest release 6 Guns felt like homework before I started watching it.  As the film unfolded, it began to feel a tad bit more like I was the subject of a blind, amateur dentist’s first root canal. (more…)

Pale Rider suffers from its impressive company.  You see, Pale Rider is director/star Clint Eastwood’s second-to-last Western, the last being 1992’s Unforgiven, which is in my mind (and many others) the finest Western ever made.  Years ago, when I first saw Pale Rider, it was after I’d seen Unforgiven.  While I thought Pale Rider was “good,” it was nowhere near Unforgiven’s awesomeness.

Recently, I sat down and watched Pale Rider for a second time.  After the second go-round, as a more mature and observant movie connoisseur, I feel comfortable elevating Pale Rider from “pretty good” to “pretty great.” (more…)

From the movie Paint Your Wagon.  For the record, Clint Eastwood: You are perhaps the greatest living filmmaker.  But what were you (and Lee Marvin!) thinking when you made a Western musical???? (more…)

If ye’re lookin’ fer a good Western, stranger, and ya ain’t in a perticular hurry, why I reckon Appaloosa is the talkin’ picture fer ya.  This is the most easy-going Western in the ol’ West.  Nobody’s in a rush to git nowheres, whither it be a threatenin’ a feller’s well-bein’ or a courtin’ the lady folk.  So mosey on down to the local talkin’ picture boutique and rassle ya a copy of Appaloosa!

Okay, I’ll stop talking like that now.

Every year or two, there’s a new Western from A-list stars that is critically acclaimed and is credited with attempting to revive the dying Western genre.  Of course the Western is not dying, it’s just been relegated to a novelty that occasionally gets dusted off when a star like Ed Harris decides he wants to make a Western.  Appaloosa is the latest film to re-re-re-re-revive the Western, just recently released on DVD/Blu Ray.  Though technically it’s not an A-list project, featuring Ed Harris, Viggo Mortensen, and Jeremy Irons, but it’s still a B+-list project (Renee Zellweger, I grant you, is an A-lister).
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Some movies strike you as terrific! immediately as you walk out of the theater on an emotional high.  The afterglow sometimes fades into shame (see: Independence Day) or the affection can endure (Bourne Supremacy).

There is a different class of movie, the kind that can appear at first to be merely adequate or perhaps even pedestrian, but fondness grows with time as aspects of the movie stick in your mind until you succumb to a second viewing and see it in a whole new perspective.  To me, the perfect example of this is Clint Eastwood’s 1992 masterpiece, Unforgiven.
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For the record, I like John Wayne movies and John Wayne in particular.  So, all the bad things I’m going to say about this movie, King of the Pecos, please forgive me in advance.
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Breakheart Pass is a stellar Charles Bronson movie, a classic Western, and an old-fashioned murder mystery with a healthy dose of conspiracy to boot.
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This is the second in the series of blogs on the movies that didn’t quite make my personal top ten favorite films of all time (in a coming soon film.ispwn.com podcast).  The last one was Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie, which was based on my favorite TV show ever but I couldn’t bring myself to place in the top ten simply because it would have been for the love of the show more than the movie.  Another personal favorite is . . . (dramatic pause) . . . THE THREE AMIGOS.  Yes, the ’86 comedy starring Chevy Chase, Steve Martin, and Martin Short.  This is one you probably won’t find on any legitimate film critic’s list of top thousand favorite movies, but I am fortunately no legitimate film critic.  If I were a paid critic, I’d have actually have had to watch grotesque movies like Hostel 2, which I’ll never do.

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The Proposition is a movie few of you have even know the title; yet it was definitely one of the best westerns I’ve ever seen. I call it savage because I can’t think of anything else that fits. The opening credits are ominously foreshadowing as a small child, innocent sounding sings of a better land far far away. The Proposition is violent because the world the characters live in is no different.

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