Tag: western

High Noon

~ Mark

High Noon. Great movie. Here are some very good reasons to watch it: 1. It takes place in real time – 85 lean, tense minutes. The deadline is firm. No dilly-dallying. 2. There’s plenty left unsaid/implied. I love when the backstory and mechanics aren’t fully clear and you end up guessing (often along with the characters themselves) and interpreting relationships based on a few clues here and there – a gesture, a look, a rhythm of conversation that suggests years. (And in this movie, given that the plot hinges on an event approaching at noon, there’s not much time for backstory, either.) 3. Gary Cooper is really good. I need to see more with him. 4. Grace Kelly. 5. It’s the first film appearance of Lee Van Cleef.

~ Mark

seoulbrother:

Six years ago Wikipedia started with a radical idea. That’s true. I ain’t promising you nothing extra. I’m just giving you life and you’re giving me life. And I’m saying that men can live together without butchering one another.

Now remember, when things look bad and it looks like you’re not gonna make it, then you gotta get mean. I mean plumb, mad-dog mean. ‘Cause if you lose your head and you give up then you neither live nor win. That’s just the way it is.

Dyin’ ain’t much of a living, boy.

Please consider a generous donation to the Wikimedia Foundation.

UPDATE: Download the Safari extension by Troy Gaul that puts this on Wikipedia. After installing, see it in action here.
(via Daring Fireball)

~ Mark

Nowadays, while literary men seem to have neglected their epic duties, the epic has been saved for us, strangely enough, by the Westerns.

Jorge Luis Borges in an otherwise somewhat disappointing Paris Review interview.
~ Mark

austinkleon:

Doorways in John Ford’s The Searchers

Are you going in or are you staying out? In the world of The Searchers you must choose. You can’t have both. In this movie, everyone is on the threshold of that choice. And for some, it isn’t a choice at all, it’s just the way things work. Everything you want, everything you search for, is “out there”, or, on the flipside, everything you want is “in there”. There is a giant gap between in and out. Characters are seen standing a bit away from the house, with people clustered in the doorway, and it seems like anything, anything can happen in that gap.

I was reminded of this by the True Grit shot.

Great, great article. Liminality, my friends. And while we’re on the topic, I tumbled a doorway shot from The Outlaw Josey Wales after I watched it a month or so ago:

Unforgiven

~ Mark

Unforgiven. This is a very, very good movie. There’s so much psychological fodder here: regret, revenge, greed, vanity. Beautifully shot and edited. A killer starring cast and a deep bench of side characters that round out the town life. My favorite part is the subtext with the biographer W.W. Beauchamp and his parasitic/symbiotic relationship with the narcissistic, murderous men in the film. He’s the everyman, fascinated and terrified of the violence, jotting down every detail while pissing his pants. Eastwood dedicated the movie to Don and Sergio.

~ Mark

https://www.tumblr.com/audio_file/mlarson/932406630/tumblr_l6wyq7ypq01qzdvhi?plead=please-dont-download-this-or-our-lawyers-wont-let-us-host-audio
http://mlarson.tumblr.com/post/932406630/audio_player_iframe/mlarson/tumblr_l6wyq7ypq01qzdvhi?audio_file=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tumblr.com%2Faudio_file%2Fmlarson%2F932406630%2Ftumblr_l6wyq7ypq01qzdvhi

oldhollywood:

Ennio Morricone – Once Upon a Time in the West (via Once Upon a Time in the West: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (vocals by Edda D’ell Orso)

“For me the music is fundamental, especially in a Western where the dialogue is purely aphoristic. The films could just as well be silent; one would understand all the same. The music serves to emphasize states of mind, facts and situations more than the dialogue itself does. In short, for me the music functions as dialogue.”

-Sergio Leone

For a Few Dollars More

~ Mark

For a Few Dollars More. I’ve finally finished the Dollars Trilogy. This one is great. I found it much better than A Fistful of Dollars and almost up there with The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. The first duel in this movie is either the first or second best in the whole trilogy. I love the way Leone builds from silence to melodramatic swells of music and back to silence and only then gives you resolution. And nice little details like in the delightful hat duel where every time Eastwood shoots the hat it lands in a pool of light. And the repeated appearance of the safe during the bank robbery scene. You know something is going to happen with/to/near/around it, but you gotta wait for the moment. Sweet, sweet suspense.