by ·Comments Off on The Searchers (1956, John Ford)

So I’ve finally watched The Searchers. For a couple years I’d heard that it was one of The Greatest Films so wanted to see it badly, but then I changed my mind and decided I probably wouldn’t like it because of John Wayne, then I stewed on that for a few years until finally it sat as maybe the movie I’d been meaning to see longer than any other.

All those expectations, and I end up liking it. Worst of all, I thought John Wayne was good, damn it all.

IMDB plot summary: “Ethan Edwards, returned from the Civil War to the Texas ranch of his brother, hopes to find a home with his family and to be near the woman he obviously but secretly loves. But a Comanche raid destroys these plans, and Ethan sets out, along with his 1/8 Indian nephew Martin, on a years-long journey to find the niece kidnapped by the Indians under Chief Scar. But as the quest goes on, Martin begins to realize that his uncle’s hatred for the Indians is beginning to spill over onto his now-assimilated niece. Martin becomes uncertain whether Ethan plans to rescue Debbie…or kill her.”

Jeffrey Hunter (Jesus in King of Kings) is Wayne’s sidekick nephew and Vera Miles (psycho, the wrong man) is the nephew’s love interest. Natalie Wood and her young sister Lana play the kidnapped Debbie. John Wayne’s iconic performance in The Searchers came the same year as one of his most hated roles ever, as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror.

Very meaningful opening shot:
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Horses are neat:
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Hunter tries to temper Wayne’s anti-Indian rage:
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Indians are neat:
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Very meaningful closing shot:
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So what’s the new “movie I’ve been planning to see longer than any other”?
Sunset Blvd? Weekend? Nashville? Something I started and never finished like Crumb or Night On Earth? DVDs I bought ages ago like Benjamin Smoke and Henry V? I’m gonna go with Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes.

by ·Comments Off on Shaun of the Dead (2004, Edgar Wright)

SEPT 2006:

Funniest zombie movie ever. Funnier than “Return of the Living Dead” and “John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars”… combined! Even Katy liked it.

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UPDATE: DEC 2007

Katy might have liked it the first time, but she’s had quite enough of it now, and played computer games through most of the movie when I was showing it off to Dana this week. Well, no, obviously she still LIKES it, otherwise she would’ve either left the room or suggested something else. Dana did not immediately declare it the funniest zombie movie ever, so the screening was a partial failure. I got to watch “Heart of the World” beforehand, so I was obviously the happiest person in the room.

by ·Comments Off on No Country For Old Men (2007, Coens)

Not quite what I’d expected. Thrilling, tense, exciting movie. Brolin and Bardem are impassive Western types, TL Jones is unexpectedly the protagonist. Hardly any music. Good chase scenes in river (brolin vs. a dog) and on abandoned city streets at night (vs. bardem).

TV star Garret Dillahunt played Tommy’s deputy. Kelly Macdonald, who I did not recognize from “Tristram Shandy”, was Brolin’s wife. I knew I’d seen Brolin somewhere… he was a lead in “Planet Terror” (and in The Goonies). Stephen Root as “man who hires Wells”.

On the way home, I was pondering the storyline, decided out loud that while most movies tell you “these are some things that happened”, this movie instead says “this is the way things are.” But I don’t remember what I meant by that.

P. Nugent of Screengrab says about the Coens/Fargo:
“I tend to think of the Coens as surface guys who put an incredible amount of conscious planning into the physical details of their movies, and who are inhumanly aware of how they expect both critics and audiences to respond to their cleverness. It might sound as if I’m one of those people who sometimes badmouth the Coens for being ‘merely’ clever, but cleverness is something I’m all for; at the very least, it sure beats lack of imagination. … Fargo is a smart, impressive movie, but it is also a movie outside what I think of as their best range, and a movie that I think they made for the outside world, a movie pitched at the mainstream.”

Great paragraph from E. Kuersten from his year-end roundup in Bright Lights:
“The Coens love circles… who doesn’t? In NO COUNTRY, locks come flying off in all directions leaving beautiful round holes in which to have light issue, peeping tom doors of perception through which one is able to read at least one thing: a circle! The hula hoops in HUDSUCKER, the hair cream tins in BROTHER; the hubcaps in MAN WHO WASN’T THERE… What do they mean? Exactly! Take ZODIAC, the amazing police procedural that disappears into the same plot void which drowned the old LEBOWSKI. Again, all you’re left with in the end is the shuddering realization that “Hurdy Gurdy Man” is the scariest song ever written. And then in the other corner, you’ve got Tommy Lee Jones playing more or less the same character in both NO COUNTRY and IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH, that is to say, the leather face of America as it looks off from the Medusa-eye view of the circular zodiac watch screen and crumbles to dust. There’s no easy answers, not no more.”

UPDATE: Watched again April ’08 under slightly adverse conditions. Not as caught up in the tension of the thing this time. I admire it as a technical achievement, great acting and direction, but I’ve been veering more towards Black Book because BB has all of those things as well as Something To Say. I’m not sure that No Country is saying anything valuable, and I’m not sure that the Tommy Lee Jones bits pondering the death of decent human behavior offers enough food for thought to outweigh the rest of the film’s constant reveling in human misbehavior.

MAY 2025: I ain’t reading anything above because my early posts are terrible and I was an idiot, but I had a good time watching the beautiful blu-ray of this great movie.