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Saw this South Korean film with holyoutlaw at the Varsity last night. As the title indicates, it's an homage to and parody of Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. It's a comedy action adventure, heavy on the comedy and the action, although with an undercurrent of politics and history that I wasn't sure I fully understood. It's set in Manchuria ( Read more... )

Last night I watched Dodge City -- a 1939 Technicolor Western directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, and Alan Hale fresh from the triumph of The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), but alas no Una O'Connor. There's no movie that couldn't be improved by the presence of Una O'Connor, and while Dodge City has some great ( Read more... )

Saw this Takashi Miike film with holyoutlaw at the Egyptian last night. It's a nutty mash-up of Yojimbo (1961) and Django (1966), melding elements of samurai movies and spaghetti westerns (which have a long relationship in film), Shakespeare and Zen, with a Japanese cast speaking difficult-to-understand phonetic English. It's pretty funny and has a lot of ( Read more... )

I believe I posted a while back about Jonathan Rosenbaum's list of a dozen eccentric Westerns, and I've since watched a few more of the films, including Nicholas Ray's sublimely hysterical and operatic Johnny Guitar and William Wellman's scenery-chewing dysfuntional family art Western, Track of the Cat. The latest is one I've longed to see for ( Read more... )

I watched three movies over the three-day weekend: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), Johnny Guitar (1954), and Duel in the Sun (1946). I watched Johnny Guitar three times. What a brilliantly crazy movie! And I've just now realized that Almodovar is a link between these three movies. In Matador, we see the brilliantly crazy love- ( Read more... )

Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has posted a list of A Dozen Eccentric Westerns. Some I haven't seen and a few seem pretty conventional. I love The Naked Spur, for example, but despite its unusual psychological approach, it doesn't seem particularly eccentric to me. I'll definitely go along with Forty Guns, Johnny Guitar, and Dead Man, and I'm very ( Read more... )

Fascinating article by Allen Barra in Salon today about the genre of the Western. [Requires you to watch an ad.] Barra argues that the written form didn't reach its maturity until the 1960s. For those who like lists, here's one of his ( Read more... )

Third time's a charm? The first two times I watched this movie, I thought it was a gorgeous misfire. Maybe I was just having a hard time swallowing the new-agey premises, because on a third viewing, I think it actually works quite well on its own terms. Make no mistake: this movie presents an unrealistic, idealized (or perhaps mythologized) ( Read more... )