Film is Pwn

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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