Once Upon a Time in the West opens with a sequence of about 14 minutes or a touch under, that functions very much like a short film prequel to the movie proper, and it is as such the best film of director Sergio Leone’s career. I would very much like to call it the best […]
There is no doubt that A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More are good, even top-notch Westerns. Certainly, lesser movies have remained classics for longer, and if Sergio Leone had never put his name to another film after 1965, I have little doubt that we – by which I primarily mean Western […]
One can devote a lifetime to studying the Italian B-movie industry and still never fail to be awestruck by how majestically crude it could be at its most mercenary. The rule there, as everywhere else in commercial cinema has always been that success begets imitation, but while any American hack producer, name-your-favorite Roger Corman wannabe […]
In 1961, Sergio Leone cast an actor from an American TV Western in one of his movies. The actor was Rory Calhoun, and the movie was The Colossus of Rhodes. In 1964, he again cast an actor from an American TV Western in one of his movies. The actor was Clint Eastwood, and the movie […]
Every Sunday this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: Cowboys & Aliens. That is some seriously high-concept shit right there. How are you supposed to even start competing […]
How can you begin to fuck up a movie called Cowboys & Aliens? As it turns out, the same way you fuck up Hot Tub Time Machine, or some people think you fuck up Snakes on a Plane (I myself maintain that the latter film was the best possible version of itself): by coasting on […]
I have not seen, in quite some time, a movie that has messed with my head as thoroughly as Meek’s Cutoff has these past couple of days: torn between my lustful admiration for its visual aesthetic, my removed admiration for its narrative anti-flow, and my utter bafflement as to whether its climax-deflating final scene is […]
All else being equal, it’s tremendously gratifying to encounter an animated film – and a nominally family-friendly one, at that – which is so resolutely personal as Rango; even if one does not adore or even like it, there’s absolutely no arguing that it comes from the same mentality of test-marketing and formula and commercial […]
The sheep is going on about its business with sheeply detachment, gnawing on a tuft of grass, when it notices the camera. As it must do, for the camera has been watching the sheep from no particularly great distance for many seconds; still, you do not fault a sheep of all creatures for being slow […]
John Ford – renowned cinema icon, director’s director, master American mythologist, and prime destroyer of those selfsame myths. The man who created and cemented the image of John Wayne as all-around conservative hero, and who then spent most of their best-loved and best-known collaborations tweaking and twitting that image. A sentimentalist with a pronounced dislike […]
Ordinarily, one does not use the phrases “pretty damn great” and “crushing disappointment” in close proximity in a film review – yet here comes True Grit, the fifteenth feature written and directed by everyone’s favorite Minnesotan brothers, Joel and Ethan Coen; their first honest-to-God Western in a career that has consisted of almost nothing but […]
Here’s a man who doesn’t, I think, get nearly the respect he deserves, even among Disney animation buffs: Will Finn. Maybe because his career took him all over the place, and Disneyphilia tends to reward the lifers, like Glen Keane, Mark Henn, or Andreas Deja; Finn started out as one of Don Bluth’s kids, doing […]
