27 May - "Always count your bullets, senoritas"

Bandidas (2006)

dir. Joachim Rønning, Espen Sandberg

CAST
Penelope Cruz (All the Pretty Horses, 2000)
Salma Hayek (Desperado, 1995)
Steve Zahn (That Thing You Do! 1996)
Dwight Yoakam (Wedding Crashers, 2005)
Sam Shepard (Black Hawk Down, 2001)
Gary Carlos Cervantes (Scarface, 1983)
Joseph D. Reitman (Lady in the Water, 2006)
Daya Fernandez (Minority Report, 2002)

Bandidas is a comedy about two oversexualized Mexican women, one who is from a wealthy family and knows about archery and horseback riding and etiquette (Hayak), and one who is from a poor family and is rough-and-tumble (Cruz). At first they hate each other because Hayak is snooty and Cruz is ill-mannered, but when a land-baron has both of their fathers murdered, they team up and become friends instead. Steve Zahn plays a nerdy detective and although the ladies engage in a rivalry for his attention, he ends up with a white woman from the good ol' U.S.A. instead. This was an amusing movie, but it was also racist and sexist and it's important to acknowledge that sometimes we find ourselves amused for all of the wrong reasons.

24 Feb - "I came here as a missionary to the Indians. I think the white man will need me more."

River of No Return (1954)

dir. Otto Preminger


CAST
Robert Mitchum (Dead Man, 1995)
Marilyn Monroe (The Misfits, 1961)
Rory Calhoun (How to Marry a Millionaire, 1953)

I mentioned before that something funny I've noticed about the cultural diaspora is that older movies are completely unpredictable for me, because none of the same morals are called into action. In this movie Marilyn Monroe plays a down-in-her-luck showgirl named Kay in a gold mining camp, she's engaged with a smooth-looking fella played by Rory Calhoun, and we know he's a scamp because he wins a gold claim in a game of cards. Robert Mitchum plays a considerate father who's recently reunited with his 9-year-old son after the mother's death. Later we learn that father and son were separated because the father shot a man in the back and went to gasp! jail.

Kay and her guy are rafting down the river (of no return) when they run afoul of some rapids and the father fishes them out and gives them shelter on his farm. The treacherous Calhoun steals the farmer's gun and horse and plays to ride on to Saratoga (or wherever) to claim his land. The farmer points out that this is as good as a death sentence because the Indians will kill them all for sure. As a sign of good faith, Kay volunteers to stay behind with the father and son until Clahoun can come back with the goods.

But that's not good enough for Robert Mitchum!! Man, woman, and child take a death-defying trip down the river, narrowing avoiding Indians and rapids at every turn! All the while, Kay is trying to convince the revenge-bent farmer that her guy really isn't all that bad, he's just desperate and desperate times call for desperate measures. The son has to deal with some confusing philosophical quandaries, can good people do bad things for the right reasons?

The end is a little confusing, but no more confusing than a scene where the farmer pins down Kay, struggling, and kisses her forcefully but then it seems like she liked it? I think that sends a bad message to the children.

Here's my favorite song from the movie:

10 Oct - "I also got an appetite for greater things"

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)

dir. Andrew Dominik

CAST
Casey Affleck (Good Will Hunting, 1997)
Brad Pitt (Tree of Life, 2011)
Sam Rockwell (Moon, 2009)
Paul Schneider (Lars and the Real Girl, 2007)

This wasn't quite what I expected! First of all, there was no outlaw-ing, except for one train heist at the beginning. This was clearly about the last days of Jesse James's life. Second, it was less about Jesse James than it was about his buddies, especially Robert Ford, obviously (why on earth was I so surprised about all this?) Ford's character was painfully awkward. He started out a total dork who idolized the James gang, and slowly transitioned into a really sucky adult who was still irritatingly self involved and although he still loved James, he hated him for being the larger-than-life character that Ford himself could never be. I guess the main plot of the movie is that degradation of hero-worship. But through it all, Ford still acts like a petulant teenager, angry that the world doesn't stop to present him with his heart's desire. And in the end, when he makes his desperate grab for fame - he's vilified, and you feel a little bad, but mostly deserves it, because he sucks.

Brad Pitt did a good job playing James as he must have been - a dark and moody man toeing the line of craziness. There's one scene where he's holding two snakes up for Ford to look at, and he says "I name them like my enemies" and then he cuts their heads off and keeps holding them, watching them continue to writhe around. There is no glorifying this character. He's a lousy murderer descending into madness. But he also plays with his children, loves his wife, and in the end, willingly steps up to his own death. It reminded me of a passage from Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, which I keep lying around, about the death of Magua, who was the villain;

"As the weapon passed slowly into his heart he even smiled, as if in joy at having found death less dreadful than he had anticipated, and fell heavily on his face, at the feet of the unyielding form of Uncas."

Not that Jesse James was stabbed, but I still thought of it.

Last point: Sam Rockwell was awesome, he always is :)

4 Sept - "everything that eats meat likes dead buffalo"

Appaloosa (2008)
dir. Ed Harris

CAST
Jeremy Irons (The Mission, 1986)
Timothy V. Murphy (National Treasure: Book of Secrets, 2007)
Luce Rains (3:10 to Yuma, 2007)
Boyd Kestner (G.I. Jane, 1997)
Ed Harris (The Truman Show, 1998)
Viggo Mortensen (Eastern Promises, 2007)
James Gammon (Major League II, 1994)
Timothy Spall (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1, 2010)
Renée Zellweger (Empire Records, 1995)
Ariadna Gil (Pan's Labyrinth, 2006)
Rex Linn (Cutthroat Island, 1995)
Lance Henriksen (Dead Man, 1995)
Charlene Adams (Cowboys & Aliens, 2011)
Maria Bethke (Terminator Salvation, 2009)

This was an odd western, and most westerns are sort of odd. My first reaction was that maybe the whole murder and bringing the lawless rancher to justice was a red herring, and maybe the movie was REALLY just about Renée Zellweger's character acting sorta slutty. But of course that doesn't explain everything. So then I thought maybe, in the tradition of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, this was a buddy movie, about the tacit and unshakeable friendship between Ed Harris's character and Viggo Mortensen's character. When Renée comes onto him, Viggo says, "We aren't with each other, we're both with Cole."

Jeremy Irons, who played the villain, was an underdeveloped character, especially considering that Irons is the elite of acting quality. Come to think of it - Jeremy Irons character in this movie was an awful lot like Daniel Day-Lewis's character in There Will Be Blood, they even looked kind of alike if you don't see them side by side.

This movie was more along the lines I expected from Cowboys & Aliens. It was also a better performance than I expected out of Renee Zellweger, who is almost always irritating. However, she pulled off a desperate and worn-out widow quite well. Maybe someone should cast her in A Streetcar Named Desire.

20 Aug- "I hate most people"

There Will Be Blood (2007)
dir. Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia, 1999)

CAST

Daniel Day-Lewis (The Last of the Mohicans, 1992)

Barry Del Sherman (Independence Day, 1996)

Paul F. Tompkins (Tangled, 2010)

Kevin Breznahan (Alive, 1995)

Jim Meskimen (Magnolia, 1999)

Ciarán Hinds (The Tale of Desperaux, 2008)

Kevin J. O'Connor (Peggy Sue Got Married, 1986)

Hans Howes (Seabiscuit, 2003)

A Professor once told me that it would be possible to construct a fairly complete history of the United States using Daniel Day-Lewis movies. I have not attempted to validate his point at this time, but I will say than DDL spends a lot of time dressed in period costume.

This story, though, is very applicable in these times of exploitation by the energy industry, and industry in general. This movie is about Daniel Plainview, a turn of the century oilman who amasses a great fortune but nevertheless ends up bitter, angry, and alone. Plainview lies to the people of the community, tricks them out of their natural resources, and profits from the land they live on. There is an antagonistic relationship between him and the town's preacher, suggesting maybe that religion and business are irreconcilable (there's something about a camel and the eye of needle, dig it?). However, the preacher, Eli Sunday, never seems like a very nice guy, either, and by the end we learn that he has squandered his money, become destitute. He tries to convince Plainview to buy the very last piece of untapped land in the community.

The scenes between Eli Sunday and Daniel Plainview are the very best in the movie. The first happens when Plainview is getting baptized to gain the trust of a community member. The second occurs when Eli visits Daniel at the end of the film. Both of these scenes are highly emotional and intensely physical - you can tell they are throwing their whole bodies into it, and it was at this point that I decided that Paul Dano is a good actor, and not just the awkward-looking teenager in Little Miss Sunshine.

The emotional aspect comes from the anti-hero's inability to create a familial bond. Despite an obvious yearning to do so, he consistently destroys every loving relationship he creates. The first is with his adopted son, who he sends away only to call back, but then disowns him at the end of the movie. The second is with the man who impersonates his brother, who, although deceptive, we can only assume was genuine in his desire for a fraternal relationship. Finally, when Eli Sunday makes the claim that he and Daniel are "brothers," Daniel loses control entirely. For this reason he ends up alone, a loser.

4 Aug - "I don't know much about boats, but I would say that one's upside down."

Cowboys & Aliens (2011)
dir. Jon Favreau (Elf, 2003)

CAST

Daniel Craig (Elizabeth, 1998)

Harrison Ford (Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope, 1977)

Olivia Wilde

Sam Rockwell (The Assassination of James James by the Coward Robert Ford, 2007)

Clancy Brown (The Burrowers, 1986)

Paul Dano (Little Miss Sunshine, 2006)

Chris Browning (3:10 to Yuma, 2007)

Adam Beach (Smoke Signals, 1998)

Ana de la Reguera (Nacho Libre, 2006)

Noah Ringer (The Last Airbender, 2010)

Toby Huss (Vegas Vacation, 1997)

Walton Goggins (Shanghai Noon, 2000)

David O'Hara (Braveheart, 1995)

Raoul Trujillo (Black Robe, 1991)

David Midthunder (The Burrowers, 1986)
Charlene Adams

One thing that I decided during this movie is that Sam Rockwell has got to be my #1 actor crush, which seems silly when there's a whole bevy of Adonises to choose from but, Lord help me, I've got a thing for character actors and Sam Rockwell always plays that clueless and sort of sleazy guy and it just kills me. I'm silly.

On the point, I thoroughly enjoyed watching Cowboys & Aliens, but it also failed to meet many of my expectations, and to be sure I had a lot of expectations going into this movie.

My first thought was that the core concept was very clever, because western films encapsulate the idealized values of the perfect American citizen. Independent, hardworking, honorable, etc. I firmly believe that in our (white American) hearts, we all desperately want to be cowboys because it represents a human of higher quality than we see ourselves to be (City Slickers in particular made a profit off this theme). Alien movies, on the other hand, are about xenophobia, protecting the interior from frightening and strange external forces and entities. Who better to protect America from scary aliens than the ideal American everyman/hero?

To this effect, I expected Cowboys & Aliens to use more of the motifs and thematic elements typical of the traditional western narrative. There was some of that: the decaying mining town, the impotence of official law enforcement, but this was also a very modern movie, especially in the development of relationships.

I was reading some internet articles about the movie and I have to say that they made some good points. The first thing is that the pairing of Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig should have overwhelmed us with the glorious union of their manliness, but the dynamic between the two actors fizzled. They didn't actually share very much screentime. They didn't work well together, and what should have been a friendship didn't really feel very fraternal at all. Big fail on that.

Also, I don't think Olivia Wilde's character should have been in the movie. Her presence as a love interest was unnecessary, and detracted from the emotional weight of Jake's wife's death via abduction, which was actually a very disturbing scene. Wilde's brief backstory was outlandish (in a science-ficiton movie, no less) and I don't really need to know where the aliens came from or why they are on Earth or why they are kidnapping and killing humans (to learn our weaknesses? Really? We are soft meaty bodies. Is it necessary to know more than one way to skin a cat?)

Part of the advantage of the old west setting should be that the audience can engage in the bafflement of the characters. Bright lights? Flying machines?? Are they demons?

On the other hand, old time people had to confront insane levels of novelty all of the time. What if you just saw a giant anteater walking around one day, and nothing you had ever experienced you before had prepared you for the experience. They are crazy looking and you would just have to deal with that. You want to know why old timey people believed in monsters? It's because they saw monsters all of the time.

So I think that Jake Lonergan and Corporal Dolarhyde would be a lot less interested in learning about who the aliens are and what they want, than figuring out where they live and how to kill them. I think we would have been better served with a little mystery than a naked Olivia Wilde explaining how she took human on this planet to make certain the invaders would not destroy the earth as well.

4 Aug - "I'm gonna strip away this mystery and expose it's private parts"

Rango (2011)
dir. Gore Verbinski (Mousehunt, 1997)

VOICES

Ned Beatty (Back to School, 1986)
Gil Birmingham (Eclipse, 2010)
Abigail Breslin (Zombieland, 2009)
Johnny Depp (Dead Man, 1995)

Isla Fisher (I Heart Huckabees, 2004)

Charles Fleischer (Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (voice), 1988)
Beth Grant (Flatliners, 1990)
Alfred Molina (Dead Man, 1995)

Bill Nighy (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallow Part 1, 2010)

Joe Nunez (Superbad, 2007)
Timothy Olyphant (First Wives Club, 1996)
Stephen Root (Ghost, 1990)

Harry Dean Stanton (Alien, 1979)

Ray Winstone (The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, 2005)

Good Lord! Finally I see a computer animated movie that I actually like! I feel that Rango had an interesting and compelling plot that was both intensely amusing as well as attaining a level of emotional depth that I thought was appropriate for the material. The character development was tangible and neither the thematic element nor the humor insulted my intelligence. Kiefer was so pleased when we chose this off the On Demand that he gave me a long tight hug, so clearly it was a hit with the younger audience as well, proving my long-standing assertion that you don't need to dumb down the material to make kids happy. Let's treat children like clever and insightful individuals and, God willing, they may become such.

This was fun for me last time, so I thought I'd do another brief interview with my little brother, Kiefer.

P: Can you tell me what Rango was about?

K: Well, it started out from a lizard, or should I say, whatever you want to call it, a chameleon. Is that right?

P: Yep.

K: The chameleon, also known as Rango, who's told from a armadillo that he found outside of Rango's little box in the car--he didn't have any real friends until that armadillo showed up with little tire marks on him...

P: Hang on, Kief, you don't need to give a whole play-by-play, you can just sort of sum it all up.

K: It's kind of hard to tell because it's a long story. I don't really remember most of it but I do think it's a good movie.

P: Did you like Rango better than Gnomeo & Juliet or Tangled?

K: It's kind of hard to say 'cause they're all animated, which is equal. And they're all different kind of comedies, that's equal. I can't really compare it because they're almost the same and equally divided, and they're all comedies. So I don't really know what would be better, because they're only movies and they're all animated and they're comedies and they're all, like, journeys.

P: I don't know if Gnomeo & Juliet was really a journey.

K: I said sort of like a journey.

P: OK, sorry. Did you like the way the characters talked in Rango?

K: Yeah, you could say, but I don't understand why that would be a question because different people talk in different ways. But I also wonder if all the voices are done by the same person like Looney Tunes.

P: Did you think it was harder to understand than Gnomeo & Juliet?

K: No, not really.

P: OK, one last question. What do you think is the most important thing for a really good movie?

K: Most of the time I think it would be the thrill or a journey that takes place. Or something happens to someone really poor or really alone with no friends and ends up to be in a journey for life and death, just like Jane Eyre.

Last night Kiefer and I and our Mom watched Jane Eyre On Demand. So I guess that's why he stuck it in there at the end. I guess if you think of it that way, Rango is a little bit like Jane Eyre, minus the madwoman locked in the attic. I suppose what we could glean from this is that kids don't really know what they're watching, so there's no reason the adults have to be utterly bored and maybe some of those big words are penetrating the subconscious. In conclusion: Rango = more like this please.

23 July - "Fellas like you and me, we don't run."

The Warrior's Way (2010)
dir. Sngmoo Lee

CAST

Dong-gun Jang

Kate Bosworth (The Rules of Attraction, 2002)

Geoffrey Rush (Elizabeth, 1998)

Danny Huston (Leaving Las Vegas, 1995)

Tony Cox (Beetlejuice, 1988)

I'm sick with some sort of heinous derivation of a summertime flu and life is basically miserable for me now as I sit and wait to see how my body will let me down next. The silver lining is that this is a perfect time to take advantage of Mom's On Demand and buy all these movies that I've been wanting to see (and a few just so my little brother will sit quietly with me).

From the descriptions I've read (because I don't think I actually watched a trailer for it) I was expecting a sort of inverted spaghetti-western, but running that phrase through my brain, I'm not exactly sure what that means. I guess I was thinking about The Magnificent Seven, which isn't a spaghetti western at all (usually when people are talking about those, they are thinking about Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly) --Rather, The Magnificent Seven was westernized retelling of The Seven Samurai, which I've never seen but it's probably something I should get around to.

So I guess my point is that this movie is like how a Japanese person imagines and idealizes the old American West. It is spare in scenery and props, but all of the ones that are there are over-the-top and in-your-face. The villain is villainous, barely humanized. He rapes girls with good teeth. The hero is quiet and noble with a dark past. He barely speaks. The ending scene was anticlimactic, totally unnecessary to the conclusion of the story arc, but upon exit interviews, this scene held my little brother's favorite line of the movie, and my mother's favorite part as well. So, buttons.

This movie is good. It's unexpected and totally different. It uses a few common tropes, like the typical old-time circus characters, but these are satisfying and not boring. Kate Bosworth is sort of annoying as always (can I say poor-man's Jessica Simpson, or is that too cruel?) being the spunky-girl-in-the-old-west. OK, I get it. You're like Annie Oakley. Let's not overkill the folksy expressions.

I feel like this review was vague. I'm tired and sick and I have to make my own chicken soup and the kitchen stove doesn't work. Next I think I'm reviewing Megamind or else that one is coming up soon.

29 June - "Ain't you glad the sun kinda sets. Prepares you like?"

Dead Man (1995)

dir. Jim Jarmusch (Broken Flowers, 2005)

CAST

Johnny Depp (What's Eating Gilbert Grape, 1993)

Gary Farmer (Smoke Signals, 1998)

Crispin Glover (What's Eating Gilbert Grape, 1993)

Lance Henriksen (Cyrus, 2010)

John Hurt (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1, 2010)

Robert Mitchum (Scrooged, 1988)

Iggy Pop (Tank Girl, 1995)

Billy Bob Thornton (Love Actually, 2003)

Alfred Molina (The Da Vinci Code, 2006)

Jared Harris (From Within, 2008)

Gabriel Bryne (Stigmata, 1999)

The hard part, sometimes, is figuring out what's supposed to be symbolic and what's just a detail thrown in to just mess with your head. Dead Man is a movie like that. It begins with a silent and seemingly endless train ride in which the surroundings become more and more alien. Johnny Depp is wearing a very silly looking plaid suit in a caricature of propriety, the dignified man reduced to a fool. He checks his watch as if it matters. The lonesome twanging rhythmless music contributes to the feeling that something is always just about ot happen, but it never does and altogether the frustrated anticipation confirms the suspicion that, yes, this is what Limbo will be like.

A few weeks ago I met Gary Farmer at the Cayuga Picnic on the Share Farm at the northern tip of Lake Cayuga, New York. I was too shy to say hello but someone I was with pushed me up anyway and introduced me- even though Gary Farmer was right in the middle of eating!! I was totally flustered and tried not to say anything at all lest it come out in garbled nonsense syllables (something that happens only in cartoons and in my life). Here's the picture:

And here he is in Dead Man, tending to William Blake's bullet wound.

Gary Farmer's character in Dead Man, Nobody, is on the most basic level an Indian guide. However, in keeping with the bizarre tone of the rest of the film, Nobody is alternatively arcane and vulgar. At times he's bonking a chick in the middle of the woods and scolding William Blake for interrupting "a very romantic moment," and at other times he's reciting poetry and speaking in mysterious allegories. The line I keep going back to is this,

"Things which are alike in nature grow to look alike, and the speaking stones have lain a long time looking at the sun...Some believe they descend with the lightening, but I believe they are on the ground and are projected downward by the bolt."

Because I haven't quite yet figured out what this movie is supposed to mean (And I am determined as Hell to prove that it means something). I keep going back to that line and trying to figure out how it relates to the rest of the story.

The most obvious interpretation of Dead Man is that, like Lost or The Sixth Sense, Dead Man is about a man traveling into the afterlife. I prefer to think that William Blake does not die in the physical sense when he is shot by the factory owner's son, but that Dead Man is about learning to walk with dignity through life that may indeed take you on a path "through endless night."

I've this theory for a while that the recreational abuse of certain mind-altering substances has to do with a cultural mindset that is alienated from the transcendental state. That sounds wordy. I mean that because drugs like tobacco or alcohol or mushrooms or whatever have been traditionally used in ceremonies in order to access powers or spirits or knowledge which exists beyond and above the everyday world. It was controlled, it was mediated, and so maybe people abuse them because they are trying to access that transcendent state but they don't even why or how or the reason. So what happens in Dead Man is that everybody keeps asking William Blake for some tobacco and he keeps saying, No! I don't smoke! And when he finally gets some it's from a MISSIONARY! Don't you see what's happening?

He's trying to find God, but realizing that life nor death nor afterlife is straightforward like a westward train track. God is conflated in culture and nature but these things are as stones on the ground while the spirit ascends like smoke in a twisting cloud. 

So I don't think Dead Man is about death, I think it's navigating life. Nobody is the benevolent, but sometimes absent and confused Spirit of Goodness, and the bounty hunter, Cole is the force of darkness, the black devourer of souls. What Nobody implies by his speech about the speaking stones is that we are delivered upon this earth with a plan, no, nothing about William Blake's plan turned out successfully, but we find ourselves on the earth and what happens next is up to you.

More than anything, I would like to emphasize that this film is very visually striking.

May 12- "Some people call this hell, but you're still in Oklahoma Territory"

Hang 'Em High (1968)

dir. Ted Post

CAST

Clint Eastwood (A Fistful of Dollars. 1964)

Pat Hingle (Batman Forever, 1989)

Ben Johnson (Red Dawn, 1984)

Dennis Hopper (Waterworld, 1995)

Bruce Dern (All the Pretty Horses, 2000)

I got this one in one of those double feature DVD sets they sometimes sells at bookstores or in Target or something. The other movie was The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, which made me wonder why they hadn't chosen A Fistful of Dollars or, For a Few Dollars More to pair with it instead. I've heard of Hang 'Em High, mostly from a novel I read once about a little girl escaped from a correctional center and that was the only movie she had ever seen (seems like a macabre choice to repeatedly show delinquent kids, but whatever).

"They riddled him with bullets. They strung him up. They left him to die. But they made two fatal mistakes: they hanged the wrong man...and they didn't finish the job."

Sounds cool, right? Well, it is. Sometimes I have a hard time interpreting the endings of these old westerns, probably because the culturally salient themes aren't the same anymore. I think the point was that everybody is hunting for vengeance in one way or another. Our Hero, Jed Cooper, has a tangible scar to prove his point, but his associates, love interest Rachel, and the Judge, are also on a rampage of sorts, trying to figure out how many dead men it takes to heal a scar that no one can see.

Jed Cooper is after nine men who lynched him for a crime he didn't commit. The first one resists arrest and so Jed shoots him in self-defense. Two of them flee the territory. Another one dies in jail. Two more are killed in a shoot out after they tried to finish Jed off, and a third hangs himself before Cooper gets to him. Another is arrested and hanged for murder and cattle rustling. One turns himself in. Because that last guy is repentant, Cooper talks the judge into pardoning him and we are let with the implication that the judge is the worst murderer of the lot. Which I guess is true, in that he sentences men to die. But most of those guys of villains, and someone has to maintain law & order in Oklahoma Territory!

Trailer!

Cowboys and Aliens

This is a great idea! First of all - why do aliens always have to attacking in the present or the future? As my fella' keeps telling me, the History channel makes a pretty convincing argument that they wreaked some extraterrestrial shenanigans in the past as well (of course, only in exotic places like Mexico and Egypt, everything white folks ever made was solely by virtue of their advanced intellects and ingenuity).

Alien movies are metaphors about xenophobia, right? And cowboy movies are the most important metaphors of all - because they're generally about those critical American value of individuality and freedom (and vigilantism?). So I guess that a movie about ETs in the old west is trying to tell us that the terrorists and the illegal immigrants aren't just after our awesome land and democracy, but the very nature of the American Spirit. Dammit. They're after our IDENTITY!

So I was trying to think about if Harrison Ford had ever been in a western, because I haven't seen one. Some light internet research came up with A Time for Killing (1967), which is not on Netflix but wikipedia tells me it's about a group of Confederate soldiers who escape from a Union prison and are running for the Mexican border (I'd head back to Georgia, but fine.) The other one is the Gene Wilder Classic, The Frisco Kid (1979). So I guess it's been a while since Ford exchanged the Fedora for a Stetson (see what I did there!?)

So this comes out next summer and I'm already quite pumped up about it.

Oct 10: "You'll be awake in your grave"

The Burrowers (2008)

dir. J.T. Petty

CAST
Clancy Brown (Mr. Krabs (voice), Spongebob Squarepants (TV) 1999-2010)
William Mapother (Lost (TV), 2004-2010)

David Midthunder (Terminator: Salvation, 2009)

OK - Now we can start spooky October movies - With ANOTHER western!

As far as movies about underground monsters in the old west go, I have to say that I liked The Burrowers at least twice as much as Tremors 4: The Legend Begins.

But for serious, GREAT monster movie! There were some awesome motifs, including an obnoxious military guy who brushed his mustache while the Indian captive was being tortured and kept telling Our Heroes that "As long as you ride with my unit, I am in charge of this rescue operation!" And I was really excited for this guy to die, except they went all for an ironic face-palm ending, and well, I won't spoil it for you because if I ever enthusiastically recommend a movie - It's this one. You have to watch it. It's October and you need to see this monster movie.

The main guy was a charming Irish immigrant named Coffy who was looking for his sweetheart, presumed kidnapped by Injuns. You know he's a good guy because he stuck up for the token black guy (who was not a slave) and they bonded 'cause hahaha, doesn't it suck to be different in the USA?

My only beef with this flick is the amount of time the rescue party spends worrying about how many times their womenfolk have been raped since they went missing. There's also a bit at the beginning where Partcher tells the kid, Dobie, that he should be brave enough to shoot his mother if Indians ever attack their house. The obsession with the white women being "tainted" reminded me of a movie called The Searchers, in which John Wayne spends the whole movie looking for his daughter that was kidnapped by Indians, and at the very end when he finds her and you think everything is going to work out, he shoots her. Because she's spent time with the natives and now she's ruined forever. In these kinds of stories, the woman only represents the integrity of male members of her community, and that's just too much pressure for a woman to fairly bear.

ALSO I found out that The Burrowers was a TV series BEFORE it was a movie - So I want to know if anyone has ever seen that and is it any good?