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The [Movies] Thread: Pre-Summer Blockbuster Blockbuster Season
Atomika
Live fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered User regular
Live fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered User regular
https://youtu.be/PFSFDrK3_IkWESTERNS! They're kinda back in vogue? Maybe? They're kinda like Bono and U2, never seeming to be terribly popular but never really going away entirely. Regardless, I blame the robots. Damn those sexy, sexy robots.
Everybody, name your Top Five!
- No Country for Old Men
- Blood Simple
- The Proposition
- Little Big Man
- um . . uh. . . I dunno . . aw fuck it, Tombstone, I guess?
Dishonorable Mention to Lonesome Dove, the worst case of a film (and its fans) missing the whole fucking point of the story. Good lord is that movie a heap of shit.
@Thomamelas
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Once Upon a Time in the West- because I said so that's why
Heaven's Gate- because Michael Cimino deserves some love for this despite being a box office flop
Unforgiven- still the best deconstruction of the western ever made
Quigley Down Under- the would have been The Propostition but I didn't want to copy Atomika
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Ha!
Quigley is a good call, though. A lotta fun! Selleck at his most Selleckesque and a very hammy Alan Rickman.
And if you ever get a chance, try to find a short (11 minutes) film by Franco Nero called The Last Gunfighter (it might be called l'ultimo pistolero)
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
II?
Not III?
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Yeah I meant III. But now that I think about it, *insert clever rebuttal about how II is somehow closer to the Western mold than III*.
QED
Also, no one has mentioned this forgotten gem. I cannot believe for ever why this could be.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Once Upon a Time in the West
The Wild Bunch
The Big Gundown
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
I'd add one more, but apparently it don't count.
oh and Tombstone, i guess...
I liked it.
PSN/XBL: Zampanov -- Steam: Zampanov
The best of the Dollars trilogy. Not too long, not too short. Just right.
Ehi amico... c'e Sabata, hai chiuso!
Lee Van Cleef is Sabata, a ?supernatural? Western James Bond figure? Regardless, he has a bunch of tricks up his sleeve. Plus, Banjo is a lot of fun.
Django
I wish I could have been in the original audience. Gosh it must have been mind blowing. Besides, who doesn't love the KKK getting massacred?
Django 2: Unchained
See: previous movie re: the KKK
Once Upon A Time In The West
This is like the GBU but better. I even don't hate Charles Bronson in it.
Unforgiven
Shane
True Grit (remake)
The Quick and The Dead
I tend to like methodical dark westerns that don't end well for anyone.
I'm working on a Cowboys & Aliens style movie now, because I believe in the power of genre mashups. Hopefully it will differentiate itself by not sucking.
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Top five Westerns...
The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly
Django Unchained
No Country for Old Men
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Star Wars
TURNS OUT I don't like a lot of Westerns. Probably because I prefer more overtly stylized films and the genre seems to resist that.
yeah it's got some problems, but I love it
The Salvation
The Rover
Bone Tomahawk
all recent westerns you should watch.
For a Few Dollars More
Unforgiven
Tombstone
Last Man Standing
My list looks like this for a few reasons: I don't really feel like No Country is a western even though the setting makes it feel that way. It's way more noir to me than anything. I've never seen Shane or Rio Bravo if you're wondering why Last Man is there and those aren't. And sorry Clint, I like Last Man better than Fist Full of Dollars.
Open Range is pretty solid too, but right this minute I feel like it just barely fell short, I'm sure if it were a different day it would have been there.
PSN/XBL: Zampanov -- Steam: Zampanov
1. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance/The Searchers
One of the great American Directors who brought the genre back from the dead deconstructing his own work.
2. Once Upon a Time in The West.
Leone taking the work of everyone who came before, putting it in a blender and getting something uniquely his own. This is the film that shows me something new with every viewing. People tend to like stuff in the Dollars trilogy more. But this film is a great director doing a fucking masterclass in how you do homage.
3. Shane
The film that condenses the Westerns of it's period into a single film. All of the little trappings of the genre in one spot. The white hat and black. The conflict of civilization and the frontier. The sound of spurs on wood.
4. Broken Arrow/3:10 to Yuma
Broken Arrow is what Dances with Wolves really aspired to be in many ways. It is problematic now in a lot of ways like white guys playing Native Americans. On the other hand it actual is rather sympathetic while at the same time not portraying Native Americans as all one thing. The Native American characters are people, with their own complex agendas. 3:10 to Yuma is a film I love for it's seductive evil. Glenn Ford is the charming devil tempting a man to fall from grace.
5. Winchester 73/The Naked Spur
Anthony Mann and Jimmy Stewart did a bunch of Westerns together. And Mann brought out the dark side of the madness that Jimmy Stewart brought to every role. Focus and conviction becomes obsessive mania. Passion becomes rage. It brings out aspects of Stewart that a lot of his other roles never really touch.
6. High Noon
High Noon is one of those films that if you want to take apart it's political themes you can use it support damn near everything. There is a wonderful complexity in a simple story.
7. Rio Bravo
It's a pretty great movie on it's own. But the thing that makes it for me is a single scene with Dean Martin. Dean Martin is never gonna be thought of as a great actor. But there is one scene that he has in the film that always gets to me. Dean Martin's character fishing a coin out of spitoon so he can get a drink. Dean Martin was an alcoholic and he's pulling from real pain in this scene. It's powerful to me.
Honorable mention:
The Wild Bunch
El Topo
Blazing Saddles
The Ox Bow Incident
Django
Unforgiven
Johnny Guitar
There's a few modern westerns I need to see. The Homesman is the only one I remember. It's too easy to forget westerns now. Oh, that horror one with Kurt Russell too.
Outlaw Josey Wales
A Few Dollars More
Django Unchained
The Sacketts
Unforgiven
Seven Samurai
Once Upon a Time in the West/For A Few Dollars more [Tied... maybe]
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Stagecoach
Butch Cassidy
No, because it has literally nothing to say. Its a painting; a series of scenes and not a film.
Or "A Fistfull of Dollars" or "For a Few Dollars More" or "Once Upon a Time in the West". All of which do all those things and more, while managing to not be one dimensional. Hell OUaTitW actually has a scene where one of the characters narrates the upcoming ending for another, explaining explicitly the thematic construction of the movie and the essential characters that make the western hero a western hero. All while still questioning the moral assumptions of the traditional entries in the genre.
And its not like GBU isn't trying to do this. It is, terribly. It just fails somehow. It sets up Eastwood as a pretty terrible guy. He starts off swindling bounties by turning the bounty in then helping them escape. He is the hero only because the movie tells you he is. Van Cleef would be pretty much clean hands if it weren't for the torture of Wallach and Eastwood. He is the villain only because the movie tells you he is. Leone did very much attempt to deconstruct the old western romanticism. He just seems to have failed.
I would say its an indictment of the film that people can watch it, with all the terrible things that every character does and then not come to the conclusion that the point was that its not clear which is the good, bad, or ugly!
I am not sure you understand what "big law" means. A marshall does not the full power of the government make. Hell the point of High Noon, is that the Marshall must stand alone because he cannot secure the help of his town.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is not a war film. It is not about the war. The war is in the background in the same way the moon is in the background of any number of films. Looking at and commenting on the beautiful moon or sneaking around by the light of the moon does not make a film a "moon film" or about the moon, or about moonlight.
"Duck" is legitimately different from GBU in that the war, and the relationship of the main characters to the war, is the central point. GBU could care less. The civil war is in GBU because the post civil war (and characters who may have been in that war, but are no longer) is the most common western era so lets be super explicit about cramming everything in.
Robert B Parker was and is one of my favorite authors. Not the deepest author, but a fun read and great with banter.
Open Range has some of the best banter I've seen in a Western.
It can be seen as a really racist film by modern standards, but that's really unfair to John Ford since the film was put together to be critical of the kind of racist attitudes that John Wayne's character embodies. It's just the standards of what counts as progressive statements have kind of evolved in the last 50+ years.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Yeah. The film gives Ethan a certain amount of sympathetic motive with the subtext of the love of his brother's wife. But it very much makes it clear along the way that Ethan is far, far too fucked up to be part of normal society, even with the certain amount of redemption he has at the end. But Ethan's actions hold up a mirror to the more subtle racism of the audience stand in characters. And that gives what I think is one of the greatest endings in film.
The other thing about The Searches is that it's one of those films that has a really massive influence on the film makers of the 70's. Bits of it show up everywhere from Close Encounters of The Third Kind, to Taxi Driver, to Star Wars, and god knows how many other movies. It even was an influence for the ending of Breaking Bad.
Possibly but given Harmonica's dress I always assumed it was more a reference to Shane, where he rides off to likely die alone.
--
Paintings don't have anything to say?
(I'm not trying to be a Socratic dick or anything, you just keep saying ridiculous things. Only you and the Sith deal in absolutes.)
Wallach is clearly ugly--he's too bumbling to be a real villain, but the movie portrays him as essentially venal. He's shortsightedly greedy, vindictive, foolish, a confabulator, always looking to get ahead, harmful to people around him but not as purely evil as Van Cleef's unprincipled hitman.
Eastwood is in direct contrast to both of them. He wants the gold and will play a little dirty to get it, but he's the only one of the three who expresses sympathy for the soldiers, and his treatment of Wallach at the end isn't heroic but it is honorable--he gives Wallach the agreed upon share of the gold and lets him live, when he could have simply taken the gold and left Wallach to die at the end of that noose. That moment proves him better than Van Cleef, for sticking to the deal, and better than Wallach, for not pressing his advantage the way Wallach did to him in the desert. Of the three, he's the only one who is not wholly ruled by greed. This form of characterization matches up with the earlier two films in the trilogy, too, with Leone putting Eastwood's morality in question until he proves himself a decent guy at the end.
I realize that this is a grim world of people chasing gold while pointedly ignoring the heavily moral conflict raging around them, but that doesn't mean the intention is to erase all distinction between the three of them, just as noir protagonists may end up tarnished but not completely equivalent to noir antagonists.
I'm attempting to interrogate this weird definition you have. I don't know what "big law" means because it appears to be a term you have invented? Google turns up nothing but discussions on which law schools are better than others. So maybe you want to define it for me?
It's not a war film, but I would certainly call it a Nazi film, albeit far removed from, say, Schindler's List. The Nazis are not merely bad guys in this movie (as they are in Raiders), they embody a specific viewpoint that the film takes pains to reject, particularly when it comes to Jones, Sr. ("It tells me, that goose-stepping morons like yourself should try *reading* books instead of *burning* them!") The movie makes a consistent thematic point throughout that greed, including the Nazi desire for power, runs counter to intellectualism, including the Nazi hatred/destruction of knowledge and facts.
In a similar manner to the Last Crusade, the backdrop of the war is not arbitrary but an important part of what GBU says about greed--that it is fundamentally smaller than the great events transpiring around the characters caught by it. One of the points of the movie as a whole is the startling contrast between the tone of the main plot of the movie and that of the sequence with the Union captain, as well as with the other small glimpses of the war intruding on the main plot. It's the same thing you see in Y Tu Mama Tambien, where a road trip/sex comedy is set into greater relief by brief moments when the story is punctuated by narration about the struggles of the Mexican lower classes. Remove the disparate element and you remove the juxtaposition that informs the entire work.
Phew, for a second there, I thought I was the only one who greatly enjoyed The Wild Bunch; the train robbery is an incredible set piece (one of my fav. out of all Westerns). I put it on for my friend to watch, and he just sat there transfixed (normally when you watch such a thing, one side is a complete idiot and has to fall for a bunch of tricks).
Then again, I don't know if I've ever been a "likes ________ kind of movies" person.
I dunno if there's anyone that likes every movie from any particular genre, but they like enough about the setting, themes, etc to usually give a film in that genre a shot if it doesn't just look terrible outright from advertising/word of mouth.
PSN/XBL: Zampanov -- Steam: Zampanov
It's not entirely clear who or what Eastwood's character is. But yes that is one of the options.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
that's the one where (spoilered for usual reasons and also not great thing happening)
and I was like WELP, BYE CLINT and changed the channel
PSN/XBL: Zampanov -- Steam: Zampanov
I was wondering when that was going to show up in someone's list. Fantastic movie, like basically everything Mel Brooks does.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
The intro with the robbery was such a "holy shit" moment the first time I saw it.
PSN/XBL: Zampanov -- Steam: Zampanov
I caught it at a hotel during a bike trip. I missed the intro. That seems upsetting, but the main part of the movie was intriguing.