Tag Archives: western

Godmonster of Indian Flats

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There were actually several episodes in a row of my horror podcast that covered movies I had already seen, which was a nice change of pace. But then they got (via the scare being “animal” and the theme being “Western”) to a movie nobody has ever seen before, Godmonster of Indian Flats. This is one of those movies that has two plots that have nothing to do with each other, and the payoff is in seeing how everything comes together in a thunderous crescendo.[1]

In the first story, some kid is awkwardly introduced to a town near Reno called “The Comstock”, a goldmine boom and then bust and then historically recreated town that might even be real for all I know, so he can get beat up and then rescued by a scientist and then exposed to some weird mutant sheep embryo, so we can follow the sci-fi horror portion of the movie. The second, and far weightier by volume, story is about a conspicuously black dude who represents a mining magnate who wants to buy up parts of the town and reopen the mines, in direct opposition to the “this place is a historical recreation now” ethos the mayor(?) is espousing.

The first story proceeds with lots of science talk mostly and very little plot or character advancement of any kind. The second story is an increasingly (but subtly) racist game of cat and mouse between the buyer and the town, where nothing is as it seems if you’re the buyer character, but also everything is exactly as it seems if you’re the person watching the movie. (Which, by the way, you should not be. Big mistake.)

The climax of the second story kicks off the actual start of the first story, but then it quickly fizzles out after a big lassoing demonstration, and now we’re at the thunderous crescendo where everything comes together, and it… well, it’s not fair to say it fizzles out again, because nothing this inexplicable is a fizzle. Basically, the big reveal about what’s really been going on in the first story happens, and then people react to it in ways that first make sense, and then make no sense at all, and then I cannot even figure out what is supposed to be happening, and the whole time the movie’s villain is laughing maniacally and monologuing about how inevitable his (ie, capitalism’s) victory is and always was, and then there’s an explosion, and then the movie ends, bad guys firmly victorious and good guys in total disarray.

I just don’t even know.

Also, if it seems like I basically forgot to talk about the mutant sheep monster that was the whole reason I saw this? If it seems like that to you, reading, imagine how it seemed to me, watching, when the movie also basically forgot this seemingly integral plot element.

[1] I’m actually stealing from my future self here, as it will [I anticipate, at least] be a better metaphor for the thing I’m reading right now.

The Pale Door

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The Pale Door opens with a Poe quote containing the phrase, making it clear that it’s a metaphor for death. So I think you know what you’re getting into. Anyway, there’s this criminal gang in the Wild West, led by an older brother who doesn’t really want his younger brother to be a part of this life (although obviously he’s fine with the younger brother seeing all the benefits). But the younger brother is all, “we’re family, so I’mma help you on this train job.”

As you might expect, things go wrong along multiple axes, and they end up fleeing through the night to a lady-infested town in the middle of the woods. And here’s the thing. I am not opposed to movies about witches. Do they know magic? Do they consort with Satan? Are they good, or evil, or just misunderstood? Whatever it is, I’m here for it.

But these guys found one I’m not here for. Spoilers ahead, but you should probably read them anyway, and I’m sad for the guy who plays Rick on the new Magnum show that I cannot recommend this movie. But I cannot, and here’s why: if you are going to give your witch settlement[1] a backstory where they were originally from Salem, Massachusetts (and we all know how that turned out)? You are not allowed to make it so the people running the witch trials were right. Come on! It’s one of the blights of American history! What is wrong with you people?

[1] probably New Salem, Colorado? I can’t prove it, but it needs to be true.

The Hateful Eight

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MV5BMTY4MTMxNTMxM15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwODcyNjMzMjE@._V1._CR4,4,554,751__SX1859_SY893_I saw The Hateful Eight at the Alamo Drafthouse this weekend, partly because I want to see all Quentin Tarantino movies but mostly because that was the best of the buy one get one deals this week. (I still need to see Star Wars there.)

Here are the things this movie definitely delivers on: 1) Title accuracy. It is probably almost a spoiler to say that I do not know for sure which eight characters the title refers to, but there’s no doubt that there were some extremely hateful bastards up in this film. 2) Being a Quentin Tarantino movie. Somewhat stylized despite it being a period piece (the period is the post-Civil-War West), ultraviolent, as obscenity laden as it is probably possible for a movie to be, and full of detailed but meaningless digressions.

I don’t want to get into the plot, because it works pretty well coming in cold, but what it most reminded me of was Tarantino’s version of The Canterbury Tales. I’ll say this in its favor: I did not feel like I was in the theater for three hours.

Cowboys & Aliens

A number of years ago now, I was given a graphic novel that a friend had acquired at either the first Free Comics Day, or the first one I heard about[1]. And it was, well, not very good, despite an eye-catching title/concept. Fast forward four years, and I started hearing rumors about a movie based on said graphic novel, and in fact that it really hadn’t ever been a graphic novel per se, so much as an attempt to woo movie studios with their script concept. Which kind of explains the extremely free aspect of the book.

So I started downgrading my expectations hard and fast, since I knew that sooner or later I’d be bound to see it despite my foreknowledge, because who is going to listen to me trying to explain that, no seriously, I’ve read this story and you just aren’t gonna like it, I don’t care what you think, when the title I’m railing against is Cowboys & Aliens? And, as is often the case, that worked out pretty well for me.

The movie (as opposed to the comic) had three really strong things going for it. The first was Harrison Ford playing a morally dark asshole[2], and the second was the exploration of the unfortunately-renamed Jake’s amnesia and how absolution[4] is affected by people’s perspective on your history. But the third and most important thing is that Favreau focused his remaining energy on alien tech and cool explosions, instead of a trite, overused indictment of Manifest Destiny. Not because I disagree with that message, believe me, but because there are so many more interesting messages for science fiction to thematically provide us[5].

[1] Or, having re-read my review to figure out the discrepancy between book and movie reaction, none of the above. Oh, fickle memory. Why you gotta be that way?
[2] I don’t mean morally grey anti-hero a la Han Solo before Lucas started fucking around with the footage, I mean dark. The guy is a prick, and maybe it’s too much[3] of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ excellent blogging of his grapple with the Civil War talking, but I could not stop thinking about how, while a real point was made of Colonel Dolarhyde’s wartime brilliance, which side he fought for was conspicuous for not being mentioned.
[3] by which I mean the right amount
[4] Remind me to come back to this.
[5] So, right. Footnote Four. Absolution. I love that this was the (blink-and-you-missed-it, the reference was so fleeting in the opening scene) name of the town around which the film’s events were set. That’s the kind of “heavy-handed” theme I can get behind. It doesn’t make the entire coming plot an exercise in eye-rolling the way the book’s did, it just gives you the tools to watch each character struggle towards their own individual version of absolution. If the movie had been based on this book, instead of the one it actually was? It would belong in junior high literature classes. (Which is praise, to be perfectly clear. There’s no shame in being a stepping stone.)

True Grit (2010)

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I should say at the outset that I never saw John Wayne’s version of True Grit. It is perhaps looked upon fondly? All I really know of it is that he got an Oscar for it, but it was one of those times where he deserved it for other movies and not this one but the Academy had missed its better opportunities and only finally got around to it now. Which as you can imagine is not a very strong selling point. Either way, I haven’t, and I’m not very strongly inclined to now, since I think it would be a pretty huge let-down after watching the Coens’ version.

The plot of True Grit is a very simple one, and I guess that’s true of all westerns? Either way, it fits quite well and I think something more complicated wouldn’t have been that good at all. A teenage girl’s father is murdered[1], and she hires a one-eyed U.S. Marshal because she has been told he is a man with true grit, so that they can hunt down the coward Tom Chaney who perpetrated the foul deed. And, yeah, that’s the whole plot. Which is nice, because it leaves you with another 75 percent of the movie to wander through beautiful vistas while spending time with compelling and compellingly likable characters. And when you consider that a decent portion  of those characters are bad guys, it’s all the more impressive just how likable they are.

Since I’m still thinking about the way I relate to endings, I should note that I really didn’t much like this one; it was essentially the opposite of what I would choose to look for in one, in that I felt like I’d been explicitly told there was a great deal of things left to be done with these characters and I didn’t get to know what, all in exchange for a statement of theme that didn’t really match the rest of the movie. On the whole, that’s the one downside to filming something as close to the book as possible: the book isn’t always right.

[1] This is, after all, the Old West. (Sort of, it’s really Arkansas and Oklahoma, but these were on the frontier in the 1870s.)

Jonah Hex

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Here is what happened in Jonah Hex, an improbably short movie that I saw yesterday. And I mean that sincerely, it was no more than 80 minutes if you do not count the credits. (Maybe only 70.) Anyway, there’s this guy in the Civil War, right? And he loses his whole family when another guy betrays a platoon to enemy soldiers. So the guy (played by Hollywood newcomer John Malkovich) plans elaborate revenge against his nemesis, a deformed necromancer who keeps the company of drunks and prostitutes and makes a point of blowing up basically every location he visits. Also, in a side plot that doesn’t make a lick of sense under even the mildest of scrutiny, there is terrorism afoot at the United States centennial celebration!

That said, at least Megan Fox looks pretty much the way you’d expect her to in her ubiquitous corset.

Ghost Rider

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And now I will demonstrate the usefulness of lowered expectations. Going into Ghost Rider, I expected a big pile of badness surrounding some enjoyable special effects. The special effects were, as predicted, pretty enjoyable. Of course, the fact that they can be in a February movie says more about the current state of the art than it does about the care taken on this particular project. But my sense of wonder has not yet faded on this axis, so I’ll let that part slip by unnoted. Then there’s the plot and the acting.

Acting first, as it’s easier. The scenery-chewing characters chewed scenery appropriately. (The Devil, the animatronic actual Ghost Rider, the bad guy, etc.) Sam Elliot made the best of his restrictive archetypal role. Eva Mendes made the best of her role as Bringer of the Cleavage. And Nicolas Cage played per usual. Any time he tried to be funny or dramatic, I was forced to cringe. Any time he tried to be soulful, he was fine. Best of all, though, any time he didn’t really try to be anything, he was pretty good. Especially with deadpan humor, possibly because he wasn’t told it would be funny? I really don’t get how he can be so hit or miss, but he definitely had some amount of hit on this one, which helped a lot.

And then there’s the plot. Well, really, the two plots. They’re inextricably tied together, but still pretty distinct despite that. On one hand, you have the origin story. Why did Johnny Blaze decide that jumping motorcycles over things wasn’t enough to get out of life, that he had to melt off his flesh and go all flamey and collect evil souls? How did he get that awesome chain whip? How has it affected his romantic life? Will the cops disapprove? And so forth. This part was pretty good, more engaging than any of the other February Marvel releases I can remember. And on the other hand, you have the story of the Ghost Rider vs. some demons. This was choppy and boring, and the payoff at the climax was too little, too late.

I wish I was in junior high or something right now, because ‘Ghost Rider: A Study in Contrasts’ would make an excellently pompous title.

Cowboys & Aliens

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I have a local comics-y friend who acquired a copy of Cowboys & Aliens and immediately thought of me. Of course, I had just started a reasonably large book, so there has been delay. But that’s alright, as I’m here now. Apparently, you can get this slim graphic novel at your local store just by buying something else, and they slip it into your bag as a promotional item, I guess? Or maybe vast quantities of overstock.

That last one fits pretty well. The art is fine, but the plot is uninspired at best: when aliens crash-land in somewhere in the Old West, cowboys, Apaches, and settlers drop their petty feud over land theft and genocide in the face of a common foe who, sheerly by coincidence and I’m sure with no thought to parallelism, hopes to steal land and commit genocide. Then they have a fight, in which people die and things explode. My favorite part (and I refer here to my least favorite part) is the opening screencrawl segment in which all of the parallels that I earlier lied were coincidental are spelled out in excruciating detail before the book proceeds to unsubtly (but much more forgivably) present them via the plot. Explicitly, at one point.

In case you’ve missed it, though, I’ll go ahead and mention it a fourth time, now. Whitey rampaged through North America during the 19th Century, not for the first time, but the most aggressively and rapidly of any post-Columbus period. It’s possible there was something morally questionable about that, as presented by the Golden Rule, aka alien invasion. There. Now you’re probably prepared to read this, in the manner the authors were hoping for you to be. To end on a positive note, though, the cowboy hero’s name is Zeke. Which you must admit is a pretty awesome name. (I mean that. Don’t make me get a court order.)