Cowboys and Aliens

As I said last week, I had been pretty excited for this movie until the reviews started coming in, and felt a bit betrayed. As such I didn’t go to see it. I wasn’t sure if I’d see it in the theater at all, especially what with the Revenge of the Rise of the Fallen Planet of the Apes movie getting all that praise and whatnot. Then the new Half in the Bag review came out last night, and I felt compelled to see the film before I watched the review. So I did.

This movie is about James Bond and Indiana Jones killing some frog men and learning about tolerance while the hot chick form House does weird stuff with fire, Wild Bill Hickok gets yanked into a spaceship, and one of those pesky moon clone-workers tries to shoot a gun. All in all, it’s pretty cool.

But seriously folks, it ain’t half bad. There’s at least an honest attempt at characterization for the main characters and even some of the less prominent ones, the visuals are awesome, and you get to see Olivia Wilde’s back. I wish this were an R. Some of the story elements aren’t really explained very much or seem a bit too convenient, but overall it works well enough as a Western will. I have to say I’ve been pretty spoiled by Deadwood as far as Westerns go, so this didn’t wow me as much as it could have. I’m not entirely sure what I was looking for in it that wasn’t there; I think I just assumed the combination of the two genres would be awesome no matter what.

It’s good acting all around, and the setting was very nice. Not the best movie ever or anything, but it couldn’t hurt to go check it out.

Deadwood

This show is awesome. Can’t really boil it down any further. It’s up there in the skies with The Wire and Breaking Bad, and all those other shows that I haven’t seen yet. The reason it’s so awesome is its extreme focus on characters and squeezing tons of incredible performances out of its actors. The dialogue is some of the most difficult to understand yet wonderful prose I’ve heard in a televised program, and the episode/season structure is extremely satisfying without relying on contrived cliffhangers for almost the entire three-season run. The great shame though is that it had to end prematurely with a rather large thread left untied, and it seems that it will forever remain so.

Now that I’ve started with something that would better fit in the conclusion I guess I’ll write a bit about the plot. The show is loosely placed on a real place called Deadwood, in which the majority of the characters are based on real people who really were in Deadwood in the late 1800s. However, a lot of dramatic liberties were taken to better serve the story. Anyway, this guy Al Swearengen is the owner of a saloon, and basically controls the camp that will later become a town. He’s a very smart, foul-mouthed man with good intentions but an uncompromising method. He has many, very loyal friends who help him to control and protect the camp. Not among them, at least at the start, is Seth Bullock, a moralistic man with little control over his fiery emotions who uses his position as a sheriff to give himself some outlet for his hatred of evil men. These two men are at odds for the majority of the show’s run, making for some terrific battles of character. Eventually though, greater dangers than the clash of their own egos arrive, and compromises must be made for the preservation of their livelihoods.

I can see now that if I start listing the characters further, this will never end, so you’ll have to take my word that they’re all fantastic. So there’s lots of stuff dealing with conflicting moralities, racism, honor, dishonor, loss, love, and death, as you’d expect in a western. It’s so much more than just a western though; it’s more like an epic Shakespearean play with F-words every two seconds. One theme that I noticed cropping up a lot was the characters’ need for control; several would constantly lash out at their underlings whenever they felt a lack of control or that they were being belittled by others, making them seem both petty and human. There’s just so much emotion in this show it’s ridiculous.

As expected I can’t really do Deadwood justice. To do that I’d have to write a few essays, and I really don’t want to do that. I’m done with highschool, thanks. I’m just going to have to leave this at it is and fume in my chair cursing HBO for cutting this wonderful thing short before it was meant to end.

Rango

This is one of the strangest “kids’” movies I’ve seen in a long time. For one, it isn’t made by Pixar yet does not suck, and for another it’s rated PG and includes smoking, children pointing guns at themselves, intoxicating beverages, death, and references to films that no PG-aged child has any business seeing in my idea of a PG-oriented home. All of these things and more add up to a damn good animated film that’s pretty much a lock for Best Animated Feature in the third month of the year.

Gore Verbinski and ILM have teamed up to create a spaghetti-western homage unlike anything before it, for the simple fact that it’s CG. To add to that, it’s got probably the best character designs I’ve seen in any CG film so far, and although it’s in the guise of a children’s film, the dialogue pulls very few punches in its fast-paced and sometimes college-level vocabulary. It’s a simple story of course, but the humor on the byways is just awesome.

To get back to the character designs; everyone in this movie is ugly. Straight up. And it’s fantastic. Shrek was supposed to be ugly, but he’s really not. Rango is an asymmetrical, bumbling, bug-eyed mess, and it benefits the character in spades. The variety of the appearance in the other characters is staggering, aside from maybe the love-interest, whose look doesn’t differ that much from Rango’s aside from an attempt to make her look at least slightly attractive, which I think ended up being a detriment. This sort of ugliness is similar to the look that directors like Terry Gilliam bring out in their work, and I’m a big fan of it.

As far as film references go I’m afraid I probably missed the majority, but those I caught had me stamping my feet with happiness. The best I thought was the chase scene depicted in the picture above, in which our heroes are pursued on a wagon through a canyon by moles with guns on bats. For some odd reason the bats tended to start spinning out of control and exploding on the canyon walls when shot. I was also informed of a scene I didn’t catch near the beginning, in which the two main characters from Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas make an actual split-second cameo. I’ll be paying more attention next time.

Johnny Depp’s performance was pretty good. I think he fit the bill quite well, and you could really see his performance in the animation, which was created in a rather neat way; Depp’s motions were filmed for each scene, but instead of motion capture, the animators simply used the footage as reference, inserting their own skills into the sequences to keep it artistically valid and therefore much more entertaining. I hope this becomes a precedent.

To top it all off, it’s not 3D! Awesome! Screw George Lucas!

True Grit

So it’s been over a week since I saw it. Just didn’t ever feel like writing. Now I’ve got a few hours free, and I’ve managed to avoid starting up Minecraft. Let’s do this.

It’s the second film adaptation of the book that I haven’t read. Haven’t seen the first one either, but I’ve seen enough John Wayne movies to get the idea, so my excitement for this wasn’t due to its predecessors, rather everything else about it. It’s directed by the Coen brothers, who have made some of the best movies of recent years. It’s starring Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon, two of my favorite actors. It’s a western. This Hailee Steinfeld looked to be pretty dang good.

So the story is pretty simple. This girl Mattie Ross’s dad was murdered by a good for nothin’ outlaw (Josh Brolin), and she’s hiring a man with “true grit” to bring him to justice. She finds Rooster Cogburn (Bridges) in pretty short order, and manages to get him to help her out after proving that she herself is not without gumption. Damon tags along as Texas Ranger La Boeuf, and the character drama begins.

It’s definitely a western. It has all the feel of those old movies that I remember so fondly, except with that Coen strangeness in the situations and dialogue making it even more entertaining. It’s really much more funny that I had expected, with few scenes that didn’t merit a laugh; and yet, it doesn’t feel like a comedy. It’s a drama. Stanfield does an amazing job as the lead even overlooking that it’s her first theatrical movie, delivering her confidently fast-paced lines very convincingly, a bit like Jesse Eisenberg in The Social Network. She has an aura of urgency that contributes to the dramatic edge while keeping it from being dry. Jeff Bridges is as great as ever, completely immersing himself in the character rather than just disinterestedly mumbling like in Tron: Legacy. Matt Damon also becomes a new man, much like in The Informant though maybe not quite as drastically. Josh Brolin, another Coen alumnus, makes up for Jonah Hex in his rather small but important role. The characters are what makes this movie, and that’s really what makes me love it.

It’s a very good looking movie too. Not many scenes really stand out in this regard, except for perhaps the cabin shoot-out and the arrival of the road-doctor, but it all fits together very well in its familiar settings and makes for an enjoyable view. At this point I can’t really remember much about the sound unfortunately. Maybe it wasn’t that great. Anyway, it’s a really good, simple but enthralling genre piece which I’d put in the top three Coen movies next to The Big Lebowski and No Country for Old Men.

The Warrior’s Way

I haven’t seen a whole lot of kung-fu/ninja movies, nor is my knowledge of westerns very extensive. As far as I know though this is the first movie to combine the two genres (correct me if I’m wrong). The last American-made ninja movie I saw was Ninja Assassin, so I had no reason to expect this to be any good, especially from the previews. The one thing that caught my attention was the genius line, “Ninjas. Damn.” which unfortunately was omitted from the theatrical release. Strangely though, this movie was almost entirely different from what I expected; it wasn’t a mindless action fest, but instead a stylistic, charming action-comedy.

The story focuses mainly on that ninja guy in the picture. He’s got the pretty generic ninja backstory, dedicating his life to become the very best ninja in the world, ever. This is rather hilariously pointed out with a dumb-looking text overlay near the end of the beautiful intro scene. That and the cowboy-narration pretty much set the tone for the rest of the movie. So anyway, this guy decides not to kill the baby princess, daughter of his enemy, after slaughtering their entire clan as a test of his awesomeness. This won’t sit at all well with his own clan so he flees to the American West to meet an old friend and go into hiding. Here he meets a ragtag bunch of down-on-their-luck westerners, many of which are circus performers. This adds to the weirdness ever more. He soon befriends a spunky redhead girl and teaches her the art of swordplay so she can have revenge on the evil bad-guy who murdered her family. Eventually he and his gang show up, and so does our hero’s past. An epic battle of old-timey machine guns, katanas, dynamite, and devilish clowns ensues, afterwards proceeding to an ending not so happy ever after.

As usual the previews make it out to be nonstop action. Surprisingly though the action makes up maybe 10% of the movie. The rest is nicely paced romantic comedy with the occasional midget humor. I can’t say the acting is that great, and almost every scene is obviously green-screened, but the characters are likable and it’s not pretentious in any sense of the word. The action itself is very entertaining, and sometimes gorgeous. The main antagonist is wonderfully slimy and easy to hate. As far as the whole genre-mashing goes, I think it was done well enough, but it could definitely be improved. I’m expecting next summer’s Cowboys and Aliens to put this movie to shame ten times over. Still, I enjoyed The Warrior’s Way much more than I thought I would, and I hope it doesn’t do too poorly at the box office.