My Video Series on Top Ten Westerns

Jean Renoir said, "the marvelous thing about Westerns is that they're all the same movie. This gives a director unlimited freedom" which helps explain what's great about Westerns and genre movies in general: Watching the same basic template over and over and seeing different directors or film studios have their own take on it. It's also refreshing to see an action film that you can easily believe has zero CGI enhancement to it. The 1957 film "3:10 to Yuma" and its 2007 remake are shot almost the same way.

For a writing assignment (10 greatest Western gunfights of all time), I had to watch old Westerns and ended up remembering what was so great about the genre. I was bummed out when the article proved too time-intensive to be worth it (watching five movies back-to-back will do that for you) and ended up not panning out, but I really enjoyed many of these old films and thought I'd make a pair of YouTube videos about it (the quarantine boredom cure).   

I still have no technical abilities to make a video but I've figured out how to broadcast trailer clips and I started employing a tripod in the second video. Fund me through patreon to get me making better quality videos.

My picks are: 

 10 Unforgiven (1992), dir. Clint Eastwood, starring Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Richard Harris, Morgan Freeman, Saul Rubineck, Frances Fisher 

9 3:10 to Yuma (2007), dir. James Mangold, starring Russell Crowe, Christian Bale, Ben Foster, Gretchen Mol, Logan Lerman, Peter Fonda 

8 My Darling Clementine (1946) dir. John Ford, starring Henry Fonda, Victor Mature, Linda Darnell, Walter Brennan, Tim Holt, John Ireland, Ward Bond, Cathy Downs 

7 McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971) dir. Robert Altman, starring Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Rene Aubejonois, Shelley Duvall, Burt Remsen, Keith Carradine, William DeVane 

6 Cat Ballou (1965) dir. Elliot Silverstein starring Jane Fonda, Lee Marvin, Dwayne Hickman, Michael Cabin, Tom Nardini 

The next video:
5 The Magnificent Seven (1970) dir. John Sturges starring Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Robert Vaughn, Eli Wallach 

4 Wild Bunch (1969) dir. Sam Peckinpah starring William Holden, Warren Oates, Ernest Borgnine, Ben Johnson, Edmund O'Brien, Robert Ryan, Jaime Sanchez 

3 Stagecoach (1939) dir. John Ford, starring John Wayne, Claire Trevor, Andy Devine, John Carradine, Thomas Mitchell, Tim Holt, Donald Meek 

2 The Searchers (1956) dir. John Ford, starring John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Natalie Wood, Ward Bond, Vera Miles 

1 High Noon (1952) dir. Fred Zinnemann, starring Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly, Lloyd Bridges, Katy Jurado, Thomas Mitchell, Otto Kruger, Ian MacDonald

I'm also considering doing another video where I talk about some runners-up which include:
Rio Bravo (1959)-Don't remember it well and it's been advertised as a hang out movie but that describes many a Western so I don't buy it as a defining reason why this film is great.

The Shootist (1976)-A wonderful film that pushes the genre forward by asking the question: What would happen if a gunslinger surprised himself by living long enough to die of old age? The platonic relationship with a Christian woman (Lauren Bacall) and her son (Ron Howard) is a nice counterbalance to a genre that. I had a morality problem with J.B. Books's reasoning for setting up the final gunfight: He claimed to never have killed anyone who never deserved it, but he knew Cobb for thirty seconds and never even met Pulford so how did he know that they were worth luring to their deaths in an entirely unnecessary shoot-out. But, still, it was quite a shoot-out!

Gunfight at the OK Coral (1976)-My Darling Clementine deserves more credit because John Ford carved out a story out of disparate historical events whereas John Sturges made something in the mold established by Ford. Among the notable changes, there are some positives such as the fleshing out of the Earps, the grater historical accuracy, the more dynamic development of Doc Holiday, Dennis Hopper as Billy Clanton, and a gunfight that lasted longer.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)-A Western in the outlaw tradition that has won its fair share of accolades. The chemistry between Redford and Newman was heavily praised when the film came out and the film's whimsical celebration of the two outlaws came at a time when cinema was in need of counter-cultural heroes. I love that the film features two guys who are similarly dense that neither of them think very far ahead. The film's also notable in that it takes place across multiple continents. One question is how successful would the film have been if it didn't have its stars?
Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)-The Coen brothers latest (though not only) Western is a comic-tragic look at multiple chapters of the evolution of the genre. It might have been truly cinematic if it tied all its disparate chapters into one story.

Yellowstone Season 2 Review

Yellowstone (Paramount Network) Season 2 (through six episodes)-Taylor Sheridan was responsible as writer or director for three massive critical hits from 2015 to 2017 with "Sicario", "Hell or High Water", and "Wind River." Painting a rich scene piece of the American/Mexican border, the modern American West, and Native American reservations, respectively, Sheridan tackles issues such as concentration of power, rape culture, fiscal abuse, cyclical mass-scale violence, and modern American lawlessness. His prestige TV series was hand-selected by Paramount last year as the flagship of their new rebranded TV channel called The Paramount Network (formerly Spike TV).

The resultant series generally reads like most of TV's peak offerings: A sprawling ensemble, serialized arcs and characters pushed towards the anti-hero end of the spectrum. In his three hit films, Sheridan explored very specific storylines that didn't pretend to carry the entire socio-political spectrum of their settings on their back. While the story of "Yellowstone" ties most of its sprawl through one patriarch (Kevin Costner) and his adult children, the spread of storylines doesn't do the show any favors in distinguishing itself from so many of  the show's rival shows. The primary intersection with social commentary (at least along the lines of what Sheridan has typically eschewed) is sloppily exposited through the lectures of a Native American studies professor (Kelsey Asbille).

Beyond her, the show's characters are unusually flat: A son (Wes Bentley) who's the black sheep of the family and is annoyingly timid about his fate; a daughter with a vicious bark (Kelly Reilly) who seems to shows no rhyme or reason with her verbal lashings; a son who's just a simple cowboy from a 1950s movie (Luke Grimes), and the patriarch who takes the typical salt-of-the-Earth Kevin Costner and adds a dose of vague curmudgeon tendencies. The show has been compared to HBO's hit series "Succession" in that the patriarch goes out of his way to give his kids daddy issues well into adulthood. The only difference is on that show it's universally regarded as entertaining.

Despite how flatly written these roles are, the actors (particularly Bentley, Reilly, and Costner) really sell the material although it's no surprise if you've followed their filmographies.

The film shines a light on the contemporary American West and bridges the gap between genre tropes of the classic Western and the modern landscape admirably ("Hell or High Water" did this as well). Again, there's not as much of a big thesis here: Native Americans and non-native developers (represented by Gil Birmingham and Danny Huston respectively) also want a slice of the pie, but these are actions presented without any commentary. In an age of politicized bents, that's refreshing but it doesn't necessarily equate to action.

The show is watchable which is a big ask for a viewer for an hour-long drama with complex storylines. With my incomplete judgement (I've only seen six episodes and started second season), however, there's a lot of room to improve here.

Seven Classics I've Recently Watched For the First Time

Credit: Blu-Ray.com

The Verdict (1982):
Overview: The Verdict is one of the most praised courtroom dramas of all time. It sits at #4 on AFI's list of courtroom dramas and was nominated for best picture. Before I watched it, a friend also told me that this was a comeback of sorts for Paul Newman.
Did it Live up to the Hype? Yes. It transcends the typical courtroom drama because it's a very good character piece. Its also an epic showdown of good verse evil or, more specifically, the corporate industrial complex. It is also hard to argue that Paul Newman isn't the bomb here though it's a bit odd that he's cast opposite a much younger woman (Charlotte Rampling). I know Newman was a sex symbol but was septugernarian Newman a sex symbol? It's also worth noting that there's not as many court scenes here as your average film of this genre. There are only three court sessions and much of the action is Paul Newman and associate Mickey (Jack Warden) dealing with the aftermath of an impulsive bad decision, along with parallel scenes showing James Mason working his skeevey tactics

The Magnificent Seven (1960)
Overview: John Sturges' second greatest film next to "The Great Escape" and the film that introduced him to Steve McQueen. Its one of the great professional Westerns with a star-studded cast and one of the best instrumental theme songs ever written.
Is it worth the hype? Yes. The cast might seem bloated but there's enough space to develop all their stories. The Mexican town feels as boxed in and fake as one of the alien planet sets on Star Trek but its a film rich in color and it feels in place for its time period. Its also a film with action scenes that are of higher caliber than many Westerns that came before it (though its not as impressive as Sergio Leone or Sam Peckinpagh would later take the genre)

Being John Malkovich (1999)
Overview: The film was a bizarre mobius strip of a premise that somehow was woven together into an entertaining comedy but it also hit people by surprise since writer Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze were such unknowns (though Jonze had made a name for himself in commercials). It was as extraordinary debut for both talents.
Did it love up to the hype? Yeah, yeah and ye, which is to say I watched it two and a half times. The three central characters are wonderfully formed comic creations (Cameron Diaz has never been less sexy and Catherine Keener has never been more sexy, which is to say quite a bit of character work), the film's world building is so strong that its mythology (I.e. how did Merkin guide Malkovich's parents? what happens to the kid? etc) can be debated for pages and pages, and it packs a lot of humor and sentiment into one of the most avant-garde comedy premises ever seen in a mainstream ilm.

Credit: UWMBored.com

The Princess Bride (1987)
(Note: I did see when I was 11, still a very very long time ago)
Overview: The film is a classic because it is an archetypical fairy tale that was likely THE fairy tale for an entire generation of kids who grew up in the '80s. It likely wasn't just the kids who grew up remembering the film but the parents too as it is layered with an air of wit and irony that many people of all ages can appreciate. On top of that, many of its lines and scenes are iconic parts of movie history at this point.
Did it live up to the hype? I was quite pleased. Because I wasn't dying to check out 1984-1985 when SNL came out on Netflix (only to be later pulled) and I have never seen Soap, this is the only time I ever found Billy Crystal funny in an original way (most of his stuff seems to repeat the same shtick), but the cast is well-placed with every role. The mix of dry irony and humor became much more apparent. Westley wasn't so much a star-struck lover or a passionate warrior as he was a pragmatic and logical guy who seemed genuinely surprised by his fate (becoming the deadliest pirate on the high seas) which made him pretty amusing with a role that's hard to do much with. The swashbuckling scene, which the actors apparently rehearsed for several months--and used a fencing instructor who personally worked with Errol Flynn-- is pretty disappointing when you know all that.

Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
Overview: One of the best-made films of the 1970s and one that best encapsulated the counter-culture spirit retold the tale of a headline-generating bank robbery with the robbers as the most sympathetic parts of the stories, it's a high-water mark of Al Pacino and Sidney Lumet's careers.
Did it live up to the hype: Definitely a good movie but the level of hype for this one is pretty high. For me, it felt like it was trying too hard to Citizen Kane the character by peeling back layers of his past (first the female wife, then the male spouse, then the mother) through various encounters but didn't give them enough time, and like Prince in the City, too many cops and FBI men were cast on the outside. It was a sensational acting performance, however, and there was a very strong sense of tension. It also was an interesting inverse in terms of audience loyalties (although I do believe more bank heist movies lead us to empahize with the robbers over the cops)

East of Eden (1955)
Overview: Elia Kazan's epic film attempts a biblical allegory with depression-era California. How much more ambitious can you get than that? It was made a year after Kazan's landmark film "On the Waterfront" and is possibly the best film of the year it was released (1955 was a somewhat weak year) so it represents quite a hot streak. It was also one of only three films James Dean made before dying at the age of 24 causing him to be a legend since all three films have survived the test of time (all three made AFI's top 100 movies list in 1997).
Did it live up to the hype? It was a little different than I expected but it also lives up to the hype. The film is rich with the kind of symbolism that English lit student can revel in and debate. It also has a wonderful sense of towns and the dichotomy between blue collar agricultural work and urban vice is not only thematically interesting but historically accurate of the settlement of American West where many a state line has been drawn to warden off more salt-of-the-earth laborers from the mining communities and bordellos). The characters lean towards archetypical/allegorical over realism but I'd be hard-pressed to dismiss anything here as melodramatic,


The Shining (1980)
Overview: Stanley Kubrick has had a cult loving every one of his films since I first started logging into the internet in the late 90s and all of his films were on the top 250 on IMDB. The Shining is a landmark horror film and the first use of steadycam work. It's also considered one of the most famous adaptations of legendary author Steven King.
Did it live up to the hype? I saw Ready Player One earlier this year so i saw some scenes of it, and there are all sorts of references to it everywhere (like this mock video of Lorde's Royals)
so I had a lot to work with.

I thought the idea of setting a horror film in a hotel was a great idea because hotels are such creepy places are already and the film plays off that idea pretty well. The film overdoes the musical score to the point of distraction. If you're not hooked, the film's slow moments can pile on as well. For me, it wasn't until second viewing that I really felt entranced enough by the deep well of symbolism. And who isn't a sucker for highly ambiguous endings? 

If the film community selected a top 200 English language films in 2016 (scribble edition)

While working a call center job, I decided to use my free time to make a list of what I would predict would be the top 200 English-language films if a number of expert film critics and consumer revoted in the year 2016. Yes, I'm sure if you were working in a call center you would do a crossword puzzle/word search or your nails but when you're a certified film obsessive this is what you do.

Rather than retype the results, I will repost it in its original chicken scratch form. The cutoff year is 2010.

Some of my points of reference, recent EW polls, Empire Magazine's latest polls and IMDB have placed more of a premium on sci-fi films and downplayed the pervasiveness of musicals. The resurgence of the cerebral sci-fi film w the successes of "Martian" "Gravity" and "Arrival" certainly have helped this trend as well as the receiving of "Star Wars" as not a complete disaster. 

Only the most recognizable musicals like "Sound of Music" "West Side Story" and "Singing in the Rain" make my top 100 with "Meet me in St Louis" clocking in at 102 and that could be wishful thinking on my part. It's a very significant film historically and even "La La Land" takes some cues from it, but for some audiences, it still might be overly quaint. Astaire and Rogers are still relevant but I would imagine significant vote splitting among their eight collaborations together. Similarly, vote splitting would dilute the consistently even filmographies of Preston Surges and Douglas Dirk so that there would be no clear winners. 

Similarly, a new class of Western is more en vogue these days that would align more with Peckinpah, the Coens and Tarantino than the classic Ford prototype. Namely, more violence which is why "Magnificent Seven" "Once Upon a Time in the West" and "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" (particularly for the buddy humor angle) would all move up while "Shane" and "Stagecoach" fall out of the top 100.

It's also worth noting that films that champion political truth of satirize the falsity of our medical government landscape such as "All the President's Men", "Network", "Reds" (commonly regarded as the directorial masterwork of the overtly political Warren Beatty) and "The Conversation."

Feel free to comment on my list if you can make out the handwriting.

A super-belated top 10 tv shows of 2011

Doing top ten lists in December is overrated. I half-worked on this in December, shelved it while working on a top 25 characters of the year. The lag in time has allowed me to make a better and more accurate list as I have a better idea which shows resonated with me in retrospect. This is true even if the show took a nose dive after the New Year as is the case with Parks and Recreation. Like any blogger who aspires to be a TV critic and doesn't possess superpowers to slow down time so he or she can watch everything, compromises had to be made in terms of what to watch and what not to watch. The pool of shows I selected this from is listed down below.

1. The Onion News Network, IFC, Seasons 1 and 2-Even though this is my #1 slot, I don’t have a whole lot to write here except that this is the program I was most blown away by week in and week out. I know it doesn’t score too many points for originality or risk as it is was basically an extension of their youtube channel, but that doesn’t mean the show’s not on the edge creatively. Both the first and second seasons came out this year and the show added a new level of complexity in the latter as the show became experimental and semi-serialized in the form of Brooke Alvarez’s rivalry with do-gooder news reporter Brady O’Shaw. Examples of episodic arcs included the broadcasting of the apocalypse, the computer becoming a sentient being and falling in love with Brooke, and the revealing that the icy Brooke was once a famous Russian cosmonaut as a baby. I imagine that in the same way hard core fans of The Daily Show and Colbert Report cling to those shows as a bastion of cutting edge satire, I see this as program as both the most funny and twistedly honest program on television. On second thought, maybe I do have a lot to write about it.     
2. Parks and Recreation, NBC, All of seasons 3, 1^st half of Season 4-No longer in the shadow of Office, Parks and Recreation has an incredibly strong cast that didn’t lose a beat with the arrival of Adam Scott as geeky outsider Ben Wyatt and Rob Lowe as hyperactive city manager Chris Traeger. The show hasn’t just created a strong sense of place and time, but it’s created an inviting one. Leslie Knope was originally an irritating opportunity for Amy Poehler to try out a leftover SNL impression. Now, she and her gang of government bureaucrats have become the best definition of a great ensemble: you see them less as actors and more as a group of friends we want to hang out with.

3.      Archer, FX, Season 2, 1^st 3 episodes of Season 3-The show isn't just another spy parody but a first-rate spy parody and a wacky office comedy to boot. The key to the show is that the characters are uniquely idiosyncratic creations rather than the means to and end for traditional parody.

More of my review can be found here

4. Hell on Wheels, AMC, Most of Season 1-The show is beautifully shot but doesn’t do the glamor of the West any favors. The railroad camps and the life of backbreaking labor is so hellish that only marked men would go there. The show interestingly contrasts that with two Irish brothers who think they can get a slice of the American dream with their picture show, a preacher who wants to open up a church, a whore with scars from her time as an Indian princess and a newly widowed fair-haired maiden who was told by another character that, not being a whore or Indian, she doesn’t beloing out there. It’s the traditional Western told through a lot of unique and diverse perspectives.  Note: In retrospect, I've learned that not a lot of other people liked this show because its inferior to Deadwood. I never saw Deadwood and proudly stand by it.

5.      Jimmy Kimmel Show-ABC-With his brilliant ambush of Jay Leno last year during the Late Night wars or his faux romance with Matt Damon among other things, Kimmel’s antics have made for viral sensations on quite a few occasions. Too bad only a few people know him as a consistent entity night in and night out. It’s ironic that he was previously known as the co-host of the unforgivably crude The Man Show, because I could argue that he's the classiest and most genuine host out there. Like Conan, he relies on a stable of cast and crew members as go-to sources of humor, but the difference is there’s a clear sense of affection that drives their interaction. This was most apparent in Kimmel’s teary-eyed TV eulogy to his Uncle Frank which marked a high-water mark of his series, if not Late Night Television. On top of that, he’s a pro at interviewing and a gifted comic. In short, a breath of fresh air in an otherwise stagnant format.

6. Wilfred-FX-Season 1-It took me a couple episodes to get into this, but I loved it once I started seeing it as a drama rather than a gimmicky comedy. It has one of the most depressed characters on television, it doesn't treat his illness with kid gloves and it's a feel good story with no false moments which is a lot to say for a show with a talking dog in it. Read my review here.

7.      The Office-NBC-Back half of Season 7, front half of Season 8-In the post-Michael-Scott Era, The Office has provided easy fodder for Critics to show off their sophistication with analysis of just how and where the show fell from grace. I’ll happily take the opposite position and declare announcements of the show's demise to be premature. True, the show’s suffered at the top with Will Ferrell’s lacking in any identifiable characteristic and James Spader offering little to the mix other than creepy blankness, but come on, this is still The Office and the work of a writing staff that knows what it’s doing. As the Michael Scott storyline came to an end, the staff did an admirable job of steering the show through uncharted territory and twisted the storyline to revolve around Andy rather than Jim. Andy’s no force of nature like Michael Scott, but he’s a fully realized character and the writers haven’t betrayed his arc. The staff has also kept the momentum going with storylines and grown Daryl, Gabe, and Erin.

 8. Portlandia-IFC-Season 1-This sketch show’s backstory is almost as endearing as the show itself. It evolved around a platonic friendship between SNL star Fred Armisen and alt-rocker Carrie Bowenstein wanting to spend more time together and work on a project. Not only does the pair expertly skewer hipster culture, they help us articulate and define what it entails better than we would have ourselves had we never watched the show. A tangible chemistry between the two stars and a sketch show with a unique perspective are two good reasons for this show’s existence, which is two more than nearly every other sketch comedy on TV.

9. Once Upon a Time-ABC-First half of Season 1-Last year, I'm embarrassed to say, I somehow winded up with No Ordinary Family on my year-end list. I was a little bit too stubborn to get off that train and admit the horse I backed in the proverbial Fall Season derby was a dud. This year, I'm going to go with ABC's most ambitious production and again, I have a small fear that the show's reliance on a 10-year old to dictate the rules of its universe might wear a little thin. But at the end of the day, even if the show crashes and burns, it had a great opening run that set up the possibility of a great series. As hour-long entertainment, it's been solid and the show has gradually built up its world enough to arouse curiosity over what its future may bring. A full review can be found here.

10. American Dad-Fox-Front half of Season 7, Back half of Season 8-An under discussed animated entity, American Dad deserves mention for being consistently funny and inventive. Roger, that lovable extraterrestrial duex-es-machina, continues to lead the show in interesting directions signifying just how well the writer’s room has resisted the temptations to overextend his limitless personality. Unlike sister show, Family Guy, American Dad has distinctive characters which exist as more than just an excuse to get from point A to point B in the plot.

Honorable Mentions:

-It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia-FX-A couple duds, but one of the most consistently hillarious shows on television over the last few years, deserves praise

-Mr. Sunshine, ABC-I thought Matt Perry had a fairly impressive hit on his hands and some of the side characters (particularly Nate Torrence, Allison Janney, and whomever played Heather the psycho seceretary) added a lot of color. Deserves more praise than it got. I think the score and some of its other tonal elements gave it a bad taste and I think Matt Perry's downer character wasn't necessarily appealing. I'm a fan of his type of comedy and would not have watched Friends for as long as it did.

-Terra Nova, FOX-I-Unlike Rowan Kaiser over at AV Club or James Ponziewichii P. (however you spell that guy's last name) at Time, I never thought this show took that big of a drop after its initial run. I can't deny it was exciting to see a universe with such wide open rules and I didn't see the cast.

-Sing-Off, NBC-A reality show with three great judges, a lot of great groups and an overall take-home message of synergy and harmony. Who know that you didn't need a British asshole and a dog-eat-dog environment to make a successful reality show? It might have made the top ten is I feel the show strained its format by running a couple episodes too long and I also felt the judging up to the final four was erratic.

-New Girl, Fox-Zooey Deschanel is ridiculous and implausibly weird. Even more surprisingly, I've slowly come to love her. She's so over the top and hammy, it's more of a send-up than a performance to be taken at face value. Schmidt started getting good storylines after the New Year which might have affected my rankings because it's now more of an ensemble comedy. 

-The Looney Tunes Show-Cartoon Network-Every time, I watch Looney Tunes reruns on TV, I've not only seen the skit before but I almost know the lines. In other words, I've been hungry for new Looney Tunes material for a while, so it's really good to see Bugs and Daffy back on the screen again. Then again, I wasn't expecting to see Bugs and Daffy cohabitating together in a household tackling mundane tasks like double dates, holding down a job, earning membership into a country club, being the star of a bowling league. Even worse, Yosemite Sam doesn't see Bugs and Daffy as hunting trophies, but roommates to mooch off of. Still, Kristen Wiig kills it as Lola and it does kind of make me happy to see Bugs and Daffy openly admit to being friends
-Revenge, ABC-A good twist on the high society soap opera: Having an infiltrator out to secretly destory everyone
-Web Therapy, Internet/Showtime-I did not expect to like this show because I'm not a Lisa Kudrow fan at all. This show was highly inventive in premise and execution and I was taken by surprise as its characters grew into an intertangled web with each other. Guest stars like Alan Cumming, Rashida Jones, Michael McDonald, Selma Blair and Molly Shannon all deserve great praise.


Just to let you all know what I saw this year:
2 Broke Girls, CBS, 2 and a Half Men, CBS, 30 Rock, NBC, Big Bang Theory, CBS, Bob's Burgers, Fox. Bored to Death, HBO, Burn Notice, USA, Community, NBC, Conan, TBS, Cougartown, ABC, Daily Show & Colbert Report, Comedy Central, Eastbound & Down, HBO (just one ep. but I hated it), Family Guy, FOX, Free Agents, NBC, Funny or Die Show, HBO, Futurama, NBC, Glee, Fox, Grimm, NBC, H8R, CW, Happy Endings, ABC, Ice Road Truckers, History Channel, In Plain Sight, USA, Last Man Standing, ABC, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, NBC, Life and Times of Tim, HBO (or that might be 2010, not sure), Mad, Cartoon Network, Misfits, Hulu (Although the 3 episodes I saw were originally produced in 2009), Modern Family, ABC, Off the Map, ABC, Onion Sports Dome, Comedy Central, Outsourced, NBC, Pan Am, ABC, Playboy Club, NBC, Raising Hope, Fox, Retired at 35, TV Land, Ricky Gervais Show, HBO, Royal Pains, USA, Running Wilde, Fox, Saturday Night Live, NBC, S*$# my Dad Says, CBS, Sports Show with Norm McDonald, Comedy Central, Suburgatory, ABC; United States of Tara, Showtime, Waking Dead, AMC, Wipeout, ABC

Links to articles of mine on helium

I've taken to writing more and more on helium as of late. That is why this blog is slower but I appreciate all who read. I just feel the need for a change of pace. This blog will be going on hiatus soon. In the meantime, here are a couple of articles on helium.com I've written. One is a compilation of the top ten definitive Westerns while the other is a look at what made the Coen Brothers successful:
http://www.helium.com/items/1166614-westerns-top-10-westerns-film-genres
Briefly, my list is 1. Searchers, John Ford 2 High Noon, Fred Zinneman, 3. Stagecoach, John Ford, 4. Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpaugh, 5. Once Upon a Time in the West, Sergio Leone, 6. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, George Roy Hill, 7. Rio Bravo, Howard Hawks, 8. Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood, 9. My Darling Clementine, John Ford, 10. McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Robert Altman

http://www.helium.com/items/1166504-coen-brothers-films-genre

Reviews of Cat Ballou (1965) and Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff (1966)

I have an Oscar blog I will be posting on here soon, and other stuff, but in the meantime, reviews of two films I've seen today:

Cat Ballou:
Cat Ballou veers towards parody with its drunken hero who seems to commit his greatest acts of heroism by accident and occasional moments of slapstick humor interspersed with the action but by no means is it a full-blown parody. It's a uniquely charming story in the Western landscape of an unlikely heroine who's resourceful to get by in a man's world and in that sense, the it's more of a feminist power trip whereas the Wild West is being used to illustrate a man's world, than it is a traditional Western.



Jane Fonda, who I have never previously had the pleasure of seeing at an age of less than 60, is radiant and charming (and just plain hot) as the heroine and very easy to root for. Like Rio Bravo or The Wild Bunch, there's also a very enjoyable sense of camaraderie between Fonda and her gang of outlaws which include Michael Callan, Dwayne Hickman, and Tom Nardini, and Lee Marvin in a role that won him an Oscar (although, I have absolutely no clue why). Also of note, Danny Kaye and Nat King Cole are featured as a Greek chorus of sorts singing musical numbers.



Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff:


Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff is a film that I can honestly say is like nothing you've ever seen before. It's like horror meets melodrama. The best I can do for a synopsis is it's about a couple who invites another couple over for an evening's entertainment but instead of playing pictionary, they subject the couple and each other to a series of twisted psychological games. Why the younger couple voluntarily staying through these twisted psychological games for the duration of the evening was clearly the screenwriter/playwright's biggest challenge and he partially succeeds in setting things up so that the couple is partially captive to the situation. I'm willing to excuse the screenwriter for this because it's such a fascinating piece.

The dialogue is stylized to the point that it has virtually no frame of reference in reality. I say virtually because if you came from a household that dysfunctional, you probably would have committed suicide by now, but if you haven't and you saw this film you would relate but for the rest of us, it's more of an abstraction. Aside from the quality of the dialogue the reason to watch this film, is the way these four actors take such nonsensical words and actions and make it come to life. Sandy Dennis and Elizabeth Taylor won Oscars for their roles and George Segal (Just Shoot Me) and Richard Burton were nominated and every one of them deserved the praise. Burton, in particular, was so convincingly mad, it's just emotionally draining to watch him spin emotional circles around logic on screen.






The film is Mike Nicholl's debut (and marks the eighth film I've seen of his making him the director I'm 4th most familiar with),

Rio Bravo's influence on Quentin Tarantino

I just saw Rio Bravo and couldn't help but remember that Quentin Tarantino has it listed in his three favorite movies and there's a youtube clip out there of him giving an introduction to the film at a private screening at Cannes Film Festival this past year.

When I think about it, Rio Bravo is very much a prototype to the kinds of buddy cop films and action spectacles we see today. The action sequences in Rio Bravo are brief but they are gripping, and more importantly masterfully and carefully choreographed. The scene where Chance ducks out of the way while Stumpy shoots two guys dead in the jail room, seems like a power play pulled out of a Jean Claude Van Damme film.

That kind of masterfully planned out violence combined with the light-hearded camaraderie is so prevalent on modern filmmaking and in Quentin Tarantino's own stuff that I'm surprised it's not more obvious.

To be honest, Rio Bravo is one of the few Westerns I've seen where a lot of white people are getting shot at and killed and none of the characters seem to think much of it and I don't think the camera/director wants us to think much of it either.

Let me try to compare this to the Westerns I've seen: In Shane, how many deaths were there in the film? Jack Palance kills someone and that's made a big deal of because he's been humanized, there were people in the community who cared for him. Then Shane shoots i think 3 people in the final showdown (maybe 4).

In High Noon, a big deal was made out of this sheriff killing 4 people and no one would risk their lives to help defend him because that meant not getting killed either.

In films like The Searchers and Stagecoach there's a lot of aimless shooting but at Indians, which were kind of marginalized in the films. When someone is killed in The Searchers, be it Lucy or Ethan's sister-in-law, then it's treated with a lot of gravity.

Then there were later pictures like Wild Bunch and Leone's films which had a lot of killing but Wild Bunch was like 10 years later. Dean Martin shoots one guy dead when he's checking to see his shoes, they shoot 2 or 3 more in the prison and at the final showdown they shoot another 10 people dead without thinking much of it. This is the kind of stuff I'm used to seeing in a James Bond or Death Wish film but not a 1959 Western.

Rio Bravo

I just saw Rio Bravo, one of the great Westerns from the John Wayne catalogue, that was directed by Howard Hawks and concieved by Hawks and Wayne as a more right-wing response to the supposedly "Unamerican" High Noon, but that's somewhat of an exxageration. There were a couple minor things about High Noon which Hawks and Wayne were responding to: Mainly that the sherriff shouldn't have gone asking inexperienced Deputies to help him and that in the event that he were to ask them, the townspeople of America would not have been that callow and shelfish (btw, a sidenote: reason #41 why High Noon is a great film: the characters make such complex choices, that you can argue for hours about the morality of their decisions).


In any case, I thought Rio Bravo was a truly delightful film. Although not particularly significant in the evolution of the genre, it has an incredible sense of fun to it because the characters, all of whom have nicknames such as "feathers," "stumpy," "Colorado," and "Dude," are so colorful. One could observe that Walter Brennan's "Stumpy" is the comic relief in the group, but one stroke of genius is that every character has a little bit of humor in them. Dean Martin (playing the alcoholic sidekick "Dude"), at times, plays the straight man to Stumpy or John Wayne, like he often did on the Dean Martin show. Martin is an unlikely choice but I think it's pitch perfect casting. Angie Dickinson and John Wayne made a good comic pairing as well. Watching Stagecoach and Searchers it's hard to fathom Wayne having a lighter side, but he does.

If I had to think of a theme to Rio Bravo it might be that of having to act in the present. Wayne's doubled by Colorado as the naive kid who he used to be, Dude as a reminder of how he could have turned out if he had so easily fallen into temptation, and Stumpy as the old crippled man he will turn into one day and the responsibility falls on Wayne to act decisively in the moment as opposed to those whose moments have not yet arrived or whose moments have passed.

I also see a reverse of the classic discourses in the Western as shown in films like Stagecoach and Shane, where civilization is neatly divided between the civilized, the wilderness, and the Western hero who has to mediate between them. In Stagecoach, the civilized characters (i.e. the banker, the Southern gentleman, the cavalry man's wife) turn out to be useless, while the town drunk, the prostitute and the fugitive are the ones who save the day. In Rio Bravo, the day is metaphorically saved. Civilization has been built and the rough-and-tumble fugitive (played by the very same actor) is now sheriff of the town, and he slowly arrives at herosim by sifting through the people around him and recognizing the value of the town drunk (Dude) and prostitute (Feathers). The allusion to the fact that Feathers was a prostitute at the end is the exact opposite of Stagecoach where we learn that Dallas is a prostitute first and a maternal woman with motherly and domesticated instincts second.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

I just saw this AFI top 100 entry and you know there's no greater feeling in movies than watching an established classic for the first time. That's why i haven't seen every movie on the AFI top 100, The National Society of Film Critic's top 100 list, or every Oscar winner: there are a lot of rainy days to save them for.

Butch Cassidy is a Western that's injected with more humor and a sense of casual ease between the characters that I've never seen in a Western before, except a flat-out parody like Blazing Saddles. The very nature of the two main characters even lends itself to comedy. Comedy is often based around characters who are insanely stupid or intellectually deficient in some area. Butch and Sundance possess great intelligence when it comes to pretty much everything except they cannot grasp the concept of how much trouble they're going to get themselves into by robbing. Consider the inherent humor of these situations:

• You would think that they went to Bolivia to try to get away from being chased, but once they get down there, they go and start robbing every chance they get. Their excuse is that they don't think they'd make good farmers or ranchers. The scene in which they discuss this with Etta plays out as if they're going to a career cousnelor trying to figure out what their ideal job is and they have no sense of "well, maybe we should pick career choice A or career choice B because career choice C will severely increase our chance of getting killed."
• They think that they're going to be eligible to join the army despite the fact that they're the most wanted outlaws in the West
• They have Etta give them a crash course in Spanish so they can properly rob a bank as if the sight of guns and hand motions won't be enough. Butch also fumbles the presentation of the initial bank robbery and has to resort to some crib notes in his coat picket
• They're chronically inefficient as bank robbers. You would think that like in "The Wild Bunch" or "Unforgiven," Butch and Sundance would try to score one big job that would be enough to be financially secure, but Butch and Sundance rob with no end in sight. They do almost as if it's a weekly 9-5 job they have to show up to work at, as if they have rent and bills that need to be paid. There's no sense of "this is how much we need to buy some land." I don't even get the sense that they're even keeping track of how much money they're making. Etta says that they take too many expensive vacations and are poor gamblers, but somehow I don't buy that explanation entirely.

The main strength of the film is the chemistry between the two stars. The verbal interplay between Redford and Newman is the work of a great screenwriter as much as it is the work of two actors on their game, and Katherine Ross's character seamlessly blends in with the other two. Although we can admire her character for being romantically faithful to the Sundance Kid, she romantically fulfills the desires of both men in a sense. Butch Cassidy has prostitutes to go to for his sexual desires but Etta Place fulfills Butch's need for a domesticator (an emblematic figure in Western). She's someone that can cook him a hot meal and someone he can show off his bike to. I think the line, "You're riding on my bycicle, in some countries that would mean we're married," has a lot more to it beneath the surface. The beauty of this threesome is that she can give Butch something along the lines of what Ethan Edwards never got to have with his sister-in-law in the Searchers, yet she never betrays the Sundance Kidd. More than anything else, she acts as the moral compass that women often portray in Westerns. She goes along with the two to Bolivia when we feel that the heroes are justified in their quest for survival but when they can't stop robbing like it's a disease, that's when she foresakes them. Unlike, the classic Western hero, the Sundance Kidd's life does not revolve around a woman. In High Noon, My Darling Clementine, Stagecoach, Shane, or The Searchers, a woman or the awareness of a lack of a the domesticating woman plays a role in the resolution of the heroes' story. In this film, the characters are too oblivious to their goals to even notice she's gone, and perhaps if they noticed that she were leaving, then they might have known how far they'd have strayed.

Lastly, I want to touch up on another source of the film's greatness. The film is great because of the sense of suspense it builds up. Particularly when the railroad-possee is hunting them down and we don't even know who they are, it feels like the shark in Jaws where there's the thrill of an unkown enemy.

The final verdict on the Oscars: Genre Pictures and Oscars

Looking back, I personally think Babel should've won because The Departed was simply near-perfect execution of a good Cops and Robbers movie, while Babel was an innovative picture that made a sweeping statement.

I think in general, genre pictures that are honored by the academy (My Fair Lady, Broadway Melody of 1929, Great Zigfield for musicals, Cimarron for Westerns, and French Connection for cops movies) can get dated pretty quickly. Whereas epics and films with sweeping statements or films that touch on relevant themes. There are obviously exceptions to this rule (i.e. The Godfather was the hallmark of gangster films and American in Paris, West Side Story and Sound of Music are among the best remembered musicals) but generally films that revolutionize and bend the genre like High Noon, McCabe and Mrs Miller, and The Searchers for Westerns or Singing in the Rain for musicals or Little Cesar or pretty much the entirety of film noir don't get recognized in their day and only get appreciated later in retrospect.

So in essence what I'm saying is that the genre pictures that really revolutionize the genre and find an innovative method of redefining it, generally don't get honored right then and there because it takes time to realize the brilliance of it. You need films to follow the particular trend that a revolutionary picture like High Noon is starting before you see how significant of a film it is. This is not neccessarily true: sometimes films that are innovative like West Side Story or the Godfather get honored, but these examples are rare and if a genre film wins, the academy usually will honor a film that executes the existing conventions well. The Departed is in no way revolutionary, but it is an excellent execution of a gangster film. It is also a personal triumph within the Martin Scorsesee canon, in that he was able to return to form. He was able to leave the grandiose ambitions with which he brought to the Aviator and Gangs of New York behind and buckle down to make a solid gangster film. However, the best picture award he received reflected more of a decision to avoid a director/picture split than it did a convincing vote for a best picture. While I concede it was a close race, I personally think that Babel was that epic thematically relevant film which was well-made and spoke to the problems facing the present.

The indiscriminate nature of the gun and Departed

I spent a third of a semester in my film genres class on Westerns, and one of the first ones our class saw was High Noon. My class had an interesting reaction to that film. There general sentiment was: "This was totally lame. Why did Gary Cooper have to go out into the street? Why didn't he just climb on a rooftop and shoot them from above like a sniper?" Our film professor who had noted at the start of the semester that he had seen easily over 100 Westerns, was somewhat baffled at this assertion. He had trouble explaining it but he just said, "That just wouldn't happen in a Western." It's not what a Western hero does. And that's what we call a film convention. Something we're used to seeing in a certain genre to the point where audiences expect it and filmmakers use it as a language.

I was watching a program of the history channel this afternoon on sharpshooters of the Old West and most historians, apparently, would've sided with my class. Historians said that there might have only been one or two shootouts in the history of the West that happened like High Noon. Most of the time, people shot each other in the back or in their sleep, which would have sent my old film professor into shock that there was little sense of an honorable way to shoot someone back then. The quickest and most efficient way to lodge a bullet into your enemy's head seemed to be the route that was more often taken. It was the pulp fiction novelists who started this tradition of the pulp fiction hero and sold that image back to the folks back East, so that convention has started for longer than Westerns.

Later in the semester, we saw Sam "Bloody Sam" Peckinpaugh's The Wild Bunch which was considered to be later in the evolution of the genre. The film was just as compelling a story as Stagecoach or High Noon, but it was also very bloody and gory. One of the students delivering a report on the film said that one of the themes of the movie was "The indiscriminate nature of the gun." He noted that the film stressed the myth that a bullet would never hit a woman or a child when someone fired it. And it's true: Guns do tend to defy the laws of physics by discriminating against their target. It seems that whenever a sharpshooter aims at James Bond, he has a rare miss. There are whole armies firing at James Bond and he runs fast and manages to emerge unscathed but logically, one of those bullets will hit the guy. The message from these movies is that a true hero won't get shot and that's potentially dangerous to a world.

As the genre has evolved, it seems like film directors like Clint Eastwood, Sam Peckinpaugh, and Martin Scorsesee in the urban crime genre have dutifully attacked the myth and that's where their brilliance comes from. Eastwood's Unforgiven is self-referencing as he inserts a pulp writer (played by Saul Rubineck) directly into his movie of the exact same kind that romanticized the West and those conventions in the first place and through his eyes, we see myths being made in the process.

Scorsesee really has built a reputation for attacking the romanticism of violence head-on. In Goodfellas, he starts out showing the romanticism of the mob life but slowly disintegrates it throughout the film. In The Departed, however, he really targets that convention about the "indiscriminate nature of the gun" I was thinking of.
*Spoiler warning*









You go through the movie thinking that Jack Nicholson is one of those invincible larger-than-life heroes who partially because he has been alive so long and partially because of those conventions you think that no matter how many bullets go whizzing by in a shootout, he will emerge unscathed. But, no, just like that, in the most anticlimatic way, he is shot by Matt Damon in something that isn't thought out particularly well. You get the feeling that if Matt Damon were thinking through his actions, he wouldn't have shot the guy who he'd been devoting all his time to risking his career to protect. But that's just the point: to shoot a gun, you don't have to think about it very long. All you have to do is just apply one inch of pressure and in a quarter of a second, massive consequences can happen.

The same thing happens to Leonardo DiCaprio. Because he's the hero and we're conditioned to believe, he'll get his happy ending, we're absolutely in shock because it all happens so quickly. But that's really how guns work.