Dec 23, 2023
it's friday night in appalachia, take it easy out there
seen from China
seen from China
seen from Malaysia
seen from Canada
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from China
seen from Canada
seen from Malaysia
seen from China
seen from China
seen from El Salvador
seen from Algeria
seen from China
seen from China
seen from China
seen from China
seen from China
seen from United States
it's friday night in appalachia, take it easy out there
Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller was a dreamlike reverie on Western themes. A few other movies that did horse operas a little differently.
Yojimbo. D: Akira Kurosawa (1961). A samurai wanders into a small town divided between warring gamblers. He hires out to each of them to destroy them both. At the end he says, “Now we’ll have some peace and quiet in this town.” Kurosawa was so influenced by Westerns that this was remade as A Fistful of Dollars, which made a movie star out of Clint Eastwood.
Dead Man. D: Jim Jarmusch. (1996). An accountant named William Blake (Johnny Depp) shoots the man who mistakenly shot him (Gabriel Byrne) and is saved, for a time, by a large Native American (Gary Farmer) who keeps calling him “Stupid f---ing white man” until learning his name and mistaking him for the poet. This hipster western, one of the most violent ever filmed, is Jarmusch’s greatest movie.
Meek’s Cutoff. D: Kelly Reichardt (2010). A wagon train that may have taken a wrong turn, encounters a native American who might be able to lead them to water – if they can trust them. Renee Zellweger is the very pregnant woman who convinces them to trust him in this story where a broken wagon wheel is scarier than a mountain lion.
Django Unchained. D: Quentin Tarantino (2012). This faux-exploitation western in which a former slave (Jamie Foxx) teams up with a bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz) to release his wife (Kerry Washington) from bondage, is a canny exploration of the evil mechanics of slavery.
The Homesman. D: Tommy Lee Jones (2014). Hilary Swank, a farmer on the desolate Nebraska plains, hires Tommy Lee Jones to help her accompany three women who have been driven mad by frontier life to an Iowa sanitarium, in this bleak, Brechtian story.