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Hey, Huckleberries: All Things American Western


piranesi

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Whatever. It's an awesome show and the way season 5 ends is great. It's beyond great, but there's going to be two more seasons? For real? Well, I'll just say this. I remember when I thought 2 more seasons of the Shield was dangerous, but seeing how the penultimate season ended and how the final season played out was perfect. I just hope they get back to what worked so well for seasons 2 through 4 and forget most of season 5 ever existed.

 

The upcoming season is the final one, so only one more. In a way, I can appreciate a show saying "this is all the story we have to tell" and bowing out before things get awful, but damn if I won't miss Boyd's speeches and Raylan's pissed-off-sumbitch glares.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Season 3 of JUSTIFIED is dragging a bit toward the end.  Quarles is great but they're not really giving us a sense of him doing much beyond being awesome to watch act.  Meanwhile Wynn has been reduced to an occasional eye roll.  Limehouse is kind of bland as an antagonist as well and "who wins the sheriff election" isn't terribly compelling.

 

And man, does Olyphant have a Paul Hogan-esque clause in his contract that specifies that every female character with more than two lines has to make eyes at him and/or fuck him?  I mean, he's pretty, but come on now.

 

Also as annoying as Winona is, I miss Natalie Zea's absurd body-hugging skirts.

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I caught Lucio Fulci's spaghetti western, Four of the Apocalypse.  And... it's basically a horror-western, more or less.  With all the sadism, racism, broad comedy, misogyny, and even cannibalism shows up in a truly kick-the-audience-right-in-the-nuts way.  I liked it; I guess; it's the sort of thing you're not proud of liking.  

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I'm from a wee town in Norn Irn but I was pretty much raised on Westerns, my grandad loved them, my dad loves them and they both passed that love down to me. Hell, Clint Eastwood is my all time favourite actor and I'd say at least four Westerns are in my top 10 favourite films.

 

 

In pretty much exactly the same boat - when being babysat by my grandad we'd watch John Wayne westerns (True Grit, Searchers, Red River) and as I got older that morphed into the Dirty Harry films and Clint Eastwood's other stuff from around then (Thunderbolt and Lightfoot remains one of my favourites, same with Every Which Way But Loose).

 

My fave western is, hands down, Outlaw Josey Wales. Closely followed by Unforgiven. As far as neo-western's go, I'm loving the Justified chatter here as I'm pretty sure I'm the only person in the UK who watches it and I secretly wish I was Raylan Givens.

 

Someone mentioned High Plains Drifter earlier in this thread and that's one that I only watched recently - I was correct in thinking Clint is the avening ghost of the whipped and lynched sheriff right?

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I watched Four of the Apocalypse many moons ago and just remember it being extremely violent and surreal. You know, typical Fulci, where nothing makes any sense and his excuse is "absurdism". I still enjoyed it but who knows these days. He also did two other westerns, Massacre Time and Silver Saddle, which I'd like to see.

 

Caught the end of Guns of the Magnificent Seven this morning. Basically, it looked like a sanitized and happier version of the end of The Wild Bunch. Same year too. But hey there was a young Joe Don Baker with a nonfunctioning arm getting shot.

 

In other news, Have Gun Will Travel is still one of the coolest shows of all time. That is all.

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Sam Elliot and his moustache have been cast in the final season of Justified. Sadly he won't be playing a mythical US Marshall with the last name Earp but a weed kingpin who has made a lot of coin in Colorado and returns to Kentucky to rebuild his empire

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  • 1 month later...

Stumbled on ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST in the middle tonight and I'm stuck.  There was a thread awhile ago about movies you have to stop and watch if you happen to see them flipping through the channels and this is mine.  I'm just not capable of not watching the rest of it wherever I happen to tune in.

 

Coincidentally, earlier in the evening I saw a bit of the big dumb LONE RANGER remake and was kind of outraged when they ripped off the score of OUATitW.  Shallow ironic pillocks.

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  • 1 year later...

Saw the last hour or so of OPEN RANGE.  A lot of the normal Kostner Hollywood-isms and overplaying emotional moments and a treakly score, but also a couple of really well-directed gunfights.  Like a lot of great touches and homages to different styles without going all in on one.  Some Unforgiven-esque realism.  Some Peckinpah stylism and funky camera angles (blood spatter on the camera lens in one shot) and some Woo-esque absurdity just for fun including a great sequence where a guy is doing the "hold a girl as a human shield" thing and Costner just empties on him to where it almost looks like he's punching him rather than shooting him.  And a lot of chaos where just idiot cowhands who have no idea what they are doing are shooting guns in a crowd and it's just Bedlam.

 

Also there's a reason Westerns end with the gunfight and a quick ride out into nothingness. I get that he's trying to subvert that ending and question why it always has to be that way but man, the final scenes are like a Hallmark movie.  END THIS NOW KEVIN COSTNER!!!  YOU ARE A MAN WITH NOW NAME AND NO LAW BUT THE LAW OF SURVIVAL SO RIDE INTO THE NOTHING SO THAT THE MYTH OF THE MAN AND THE LAND CAN GO ON YOU IDIOT!!!

 

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