So Australia is a mess, yes, trying to pack too many varied things into one film that never quite meshed into a cohesive whole. But it was a very comfortable-feeling mess, and I unabashedly loved watching it.
I’ve already seen The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, which is the third in the Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood Man With No Name trilogy of spaghetti westerns of which A Fistful of Dollars is the first. I don’t like watching series out of order, but I don’t think it matters much in this case. Eastwood’s [...]
I call Tommy Lee Jones as the next Clint Eastwood-esque actor-director crossover. Jones directed and starred in this very good little contemporary western, playing a landowner who vows to return the body of one of his Mexican workers to his home after he is killed. The film looks beautiful, nearly as good as anything Eastwood [...]
The western genre has been trying to mount a comeback for years, and this might just be the film to do it. It’s about as perfect a western as this modern era can conjure; the acting is wonderful, the music great, the script perfect, the story superb. Russell Crowe plays the bad guy who needs [...]
Okay, I may need to make a no-VHS rule, because watching things on fuzzy VHS seriously tampers with my ability to judge the film apart from its picture quality. This is a cult-film favorite from director Nicholas Ray (best known for Rebel Without a Cause, but best-loved by me for In a Lonely Place), and [...]
