Tag Archives: Western

Westworld

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Westworld movie poster

 

The late Michael Crich­ton is pri­mar­ily known as a best­selling nov­el­ist, but some­what less so as a screen­writer, fea­ture film direc­tor, and tele­vi­sion pro­ducer (he was one of the co-creators of the block­buster series E.R.). Char­ac­ter­is­tic nov­els Juras­sic Park and The Androm­eda Strain are built upon fas­ci­nat­ing spec­u­la­tive sci­ence with thrilling story poten­tial, spoiled by wafer-thin char­ac­ters and sim­plis­tic plots. His 1973 thriller West­world suf­fers from the same syn­drome. Despite its high-minded ori­gins in spec­u­la­tive sci­ence, the movie is sim­ple in struc­ture and theme. It’s not unusual for sci­ence fic­tion films to be overtly based on West­ern tropes (the best exam­ple that comes to mind is Out­land), but West­world is a hybrid with equal parts of each. The sec­ond half is basi­cally an extended chase sequence, punc­tu­ated by a few clas­sic hor­ror movie tropes.

Yul Brynner in WestworldThere’s a face off in the corner

West­world posits a future in which robot­ics and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence have advanced enough to enable a new mar­ket for enter­tain­ment and leisure. The futur­is­tic vaca­tion resort Delos is a fore­run­ner to Juras­sic Park: an expe­ri­ence adven­ture for the afflu­ent, pow­ered by untested advanced tech­nol­ogy. Imag­ine Dis­ney World-like ani­ma­tron­ics taken to the next level: semi­au­tonomous robots roam an immer­sive envi­ron­ment to serve as inter­ac­tive ser­vants, sex toys, and tar­get practice.

Crich­ton skips over the entire issue of how these machines achieve con­scious­ness, mak­ing the com­mon movie fal­lacy that robots = arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. If they are basi­cally ani­ma­tronic machines, how did they evolve an instinct for self-preservation? If these droids are not feel­ing actual rebel­lion and mur­der­ous vin­dic­tive­ness, is it a virus or mal­func­tion? On a more prac­ti­cal level, there appears to be a plot hole in how all robots but The Gun­slinger (Yul Bryn­ner) appear to com­pletely van­ish after mur­der­ing the Delos’ staff and visitors.

Richard Benjamin and James Brolin in WestworldJames Brolin & Richard Ben­jamin take the vaca­tion of the future, today

Brynner’s may wear the same cos­tume as in The Mag­nif­i­cent Seven (read The Dork Report review), but The Gunslinger’s true ana­log is closer to Jaws and Moby Dick. He pops up again and again, seem­ingly unkil­l­able, pos­sessed of an unex­pressed, inex­plic­a­ble moti­va­tion to hunt one sin­gle man. He fix­ates on tourist John Blane (James Brolin) and remorse­lessly pur­sues him to the death, not unlike the implaca­ble demons that haunt Cor­mac McCarthy’s No Coun­try for Old Men, All the Pretty Horses, and Blood Merid­ian. Bryn­ner isn’t given much in the way of dia­log or char­ac­ter, but you can see he worked very hard on his phys­i­cal per­for­mance. His bear­ing, pos­ture, gait, and gaze are all unset­tling. Far from a car­toon­ish robot fig­ure, The Gun­slinger is really inhu­man, weird, and creepy.

West­world, like Juras­sic Park, seems to be a vague cau­tion­ary tale against toy­ing with advanced sci­ence. The famously science-minded Crich­ton (an M.D.) is not sim­ply demo­niz­ing sci­ence itself, but rather its arro­gant mis­use. If the first mis­take is to build machines more com­plex than the human mind can under­stand, the sec­ond is to bet our lives upon them.

Delos is a fan­tasy world where peo­ple can kill or fuck any­thing they want. In other words, a recipe for dis­as­ter. Later sci­ence fic­tion sto­ries like Tron, The Matrix, and Caprica (read The Dork Report review) would typ­i­cally stage sim­i­lar moral­ity plays in vir­tual real­ity. But I don’t get the sense that West­world is crit­i­ciz­ing the indul­gence of humanity’s worst ten­den­cies. Is it instead focus­ing on the mis­treat­ment of semi-sentient beings as slaves? When the park is in work­ing con­di­tion, the robots are pros­ti­tuted and mur­dered over and over for humans’ enter­tain­ment. After they become con­scious, we see one “female” robot reject a human’s sex­ual advances, while another is cru­elly chained up in a dun­geon. Nei­ther seems to be express­ing much in the way of grief or resent­ment. Instead, we are per­haps meant to see them as inno­cents that are sim­ply seek­ing a lit­tle dignity.

Stray obser­va­tions:

  • The sequel movie Future­world (1976) and TV series Beyond West­world (1980) are not avail­able on DVD or online at this time of writing.
  • Young James Brolin looks so much at times like Chris­t­ian Bale does today that it’s almost creepy.
  • Even Delos’ ani­mals are robotic, per­haps allud­ing to the moral tests regard­ing the treat­ment of ani­mals (robotic or real) in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep. Even more on the nose, Blane finds a robot snake in the desert, fore­shad­ow­ing the ones we see for sale in Blade Runner.

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

The Magnificent Seven

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The Magnificent Seven

 

John Sturges’ The Mag­nif­i­cent Seven is Hollywood’s answer to Akira Kurosawa’s hugely pop­u­lar Seven Samu­rai (read The Dork Report review). It suf­fers in com­par­i­son, espe­cially if, like this Dork Reporter, one watches them in suc­ces­sion. The remake is quaint, chaste, and dated in ways the fairly frank orig­i­nal isn’t. To put it another way, Seven Samu­rai is a period piece of its 16th Cen­tury set­ting, while The Mag­nif­i­cent Seven is a period piece both of its 19th Cen­tury set­ting and its 1960 production.

A remake was inevitable con­sid­er­ing the dizzy­ing cir­cle of influ­ence. Kuro­sawa was a fan of the Hol­ly­wood west­ern and espe­cially of direc­tor John Ford, all of which directly informed Seven Samu­rai. Hollywood’s trans­po­si­tion of the story to the Amer­i­can West for The Mag­nif­i­cent Seven was fairly straight­for­ward. Its great suc­cess led to three motion pic­ture sequels, a tele­vi­sion series, and is to be remade again in 2009.

The orig­i­nal epony­mous seven samu­rai were actu­ally ronin, mas­ter­less mer­ce­nar­ies akin to the West­ern out­law: morally ambiva­lent drifters, killers with a per­sonal code of honor. The West­ern genre is usu­ally about out­laws, for the sim­ple rea­son that they’re more dra­mat­i­cally inter­est­ing than reg­u­lar plain folk. In both ver­sions of 3:10 to Yuma (1957 and 2007), for exam­ple, the vil­lain Ben Wade (Glen Ford and Rus­sell Crowe) is a far more appeal­ing and seduc­tive char­ac­ter than the good guy Dan Evans (Can Heflin and Chris­t­ian Bale). An excep­tion to the rule is the clas­sic High Noon, in which Gary Cooper plays an hon­est law­man who pre­vails under extreme duress. The biggest clue the mag­nif­i­cent seven are not clas­sic good guys: Yul Bryn­ner appro­pri­ately sports his trade­mark black hat. Upping the badass quo­tient and testos­terone lev­els are no less than Steve McQueen (here get­ting to drive a real mus­tang on screen), Charles Bron­son, and the very lanky James Coburn.

The Magnificent SevenThe meet­ing of the Badass Soci­ety is adjourned

The basic sce­nario is sim­i­lar: seven Amer­i­can gun­slingers accept a pit­tance in order to defend a Mex­i­can vil­lage besieged by ban­dits. But the many alter­ations beyond this all reflect some very “Hol­ly­wood” think­ing. In the orig­i­nal, it is enough for the samu­rai that there be an injus­tice they are capa­ble of address­ing. But in a Hol­ly­wood film, there must be indi­vid­ual moti­va­tions, which inter­est­ingly have the side effect of ren­der­ing some char­ac­ters less heroic. Harry Luck (Brad Dex­ter) is con­vinced Chris (Bryn­ner) has an ulte­rior motive, such as pil­fer­ing a non-existent gold mine. The dandy bounty hunter Lee (Robert Vaughn) is also along for self­ish rea­sons; he’s on the lam for an unspec­i­fied trans­gres­sion, and needs to dis­ap­pear for a while.

The orig­i­nal Seven Samu­rai is actu­ally tech­ni­cally com­prised of only five actual samu­rai and two pre­tenders. Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune) is a peas­ant pos­ing as a samu­rai, and Kat­sushiro (Isao Kimura) is an earnestly roman­tic young boy seek­ing samu­rai train­ing and adven­ture. Per­haps to econ­o­mize the story, The Mag­nif­i­cent Seven com­bines these two char­ac­ters into Chico (Horst Buch­holz), a for­mer farmer that wor­ships the out­laws and attaches him­self to them in order to become one.

So that leaves Chris, Bernardo (Bron­son), and Vin (McQueen). In this remake’s best sleight-of-hand, we’re in the dark as to their moti­va­tions until near the very end. None of them are young men, and what dri­ves them turns out to be the fan­tasy of set­tling down into an agri­cul­tural lifestyle. The gruff Bernardo befriends a batch of scrappy kids, becom­ing a kind of pro­tec­tive older brother if not a father fig­ure. Chris and Vin seal their friend­ship with the mutual con­fes­sion that they both han­ker for a sim­pler life (a sort of admis­sion very dif­fi­cult for two very macho men).

The Magnificent SevenGo ahead and make our day

But many poor changes out­weigh these afore­men­tioned inter­est­ing ones. Being a prod­uct of Hol­ly­wood, it’s actu­ally less vio­lent, pro­fane, and sexy than the orig­i­nal Japan­ese film. The Mex­i­can vil­lagers are wise and saintly, com­pared to the more real­is­ti­cally flawed farm­ers in Seven Samu­rai. The threat of sex­ual vio­lence is white­washed away; the ban­dits are not inter­ested in the Mex­i­can women. We see too much of the vil­lains, and the chief ban­dit Calvera (Eli Wal­lach) is prac­ti­cally a fea­tured character.

But just as I was begin­ning to dis­miss the remake as infe­rior to the orig­i­nal in every way, and of his­tor­i­cal inter­est only, the movie dark­ens and becomes inter­est­ing again. The Mex­i­can vil­lagers, like their ancient Japan­ese coun­ter­parts, do reveal a dark side after all. Despite their ini­tial suc­cess in beat­ing back the ban­dits with the out­laws’ help, they have a cri­sis of faith and betray the out­laws in order to return to the com­fort zone of their par­a­sitic rela­tion­ship with the bandits.

In the old west, an out­law may very well find a home in a fron­tier town where no one knows his past deeds (a core theme of the HBO series Dead­wood and the sit­u­a­tion in which Clint Eastwood’s The Unfor­given opens). But in ancient feu­dal Japan’s caste sys­tem, a ronin could never take a step down and live among farm­ers. This also proves to be the case in The Mag­nif­i­cent Seven: Chris and Vin mosey on out of town and Chico stays behind, reject­ing his pre­ten­sions to being a rebel out­law, and revert­ing to his des­tined life as a farmer.

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

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The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

 

Had I seen The Assas­si­na­tion of Jesse James by the Cow­ard Robert Ford ear­lier, I might have included it among my Most Dis­ap­point­ing Films of 2007. Cer­tainly not because it’s “bad,” for could I make a bet­ter movie myself? Could I make a movie at all? And who appointed me a critic, any­way? But this blog is about my per­sonal reac­tions to movies, so here goes. Assas­si­na­tion was praised to the high heav­ens by pub­li­ca­tions includ­ing Dork Report favorite Sight & Sound, so I had expected it to be one of the year’s gems. And indeed, the act­ing is excel­lent and the cin­e­matog­ra­phy breath­tak­ing. But I would describe the movie as “nov­el­is­tic,” not nec­es­sar­ily a good thing with cin­ema, as opposed to, you know, novels.

Assas­si­na­tion no doubt inher­ited its notably slow pace (not a prob­lem for me) from its source mate­r­ial, the novel by Ron Hansen. I haven’t read it, but I sus­pect my own chief com­plaint like­wise derives from the book: the omni­scient nar­ra­tion. I’m not one that thinks voiceover nar­ra­tion is a screenwriter’s crutch to be avoided at all costs, but there are two extremes in which it can be mis­used: to redun­dantly expli­cate the action seen on screen or to impart infor­ma­tion bet­ter shown that told. The Assas­si­na­tion of Jesse James does both. I wish I had made a note of an exam­ple or two, but there are numer­ous instances of nar­ra­tion that could sim­ply have been cut for not adding any­thing to what we’re watch­ing onscreen at the moment. But on the oppo­site end of the spec­trum, one of the most sig­nif­i­cant events of the story, Ford’s ulti­mate dis­il­lu­sion­ment with James and deci­sion to betray him to the law, hap­pens off­screen and is offhand­edly recounted by the nar­ra­tor. Ford approach­ing the author­i­ties to become a crim­i­nal infor­mant would have made for a dra­matic scene.

Brad Pitt in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert FordThrough amber fields of grain

Although the pair­ing is not quite fair, I am I huge fan of the HBO series Dead­wood and couldn’t help but com­pare the two in my head. Please set aside for a moment the only roughly related set­tings (Dead­wood is set in 1870s South Dakota, and Assas­si­na­tion in 1882 Mis­souri) and bear with me for a moment. Most obvi­ously, actor Gar­ret Dil­lahunt appears in both. Dil­lahunt may have been type­cast as a 19th Cen­tury sort, but his char­ac­ters could not be more dif­fer­ent. The Fran­cis Wol­cott of Dead­wood is an edu­cated, urbane, and yet dan­ger­ously per­verted early Mas­ter of the Uni­verse, a far cry from the sui­ci­dally igno­rant Ed Miller in Assas­si­na­tion. But where the two diverge, and Dead­wood cer­tainly pre­vails, is the dia­logue. David Milch’s script­ing is the kind of aston­ish­ingly pro­fane poetry that might result when char­ac­ters with Vic­to­rian edu­ca­tions find them­selves liv­ing in the ass-end of the world. I found myself spoiled by my mem­o­ries of the prematurely-cancelled Dead­wood, and wished Assas­si­na­tion had a lit­tle more of its poetry.

But enough grip­ing — time for the praise! Roger Deakin’s cin­e­matog­ra­phy is deli­cious, full of warm oranges and deep unbro­ken fields of black. A notable visual effect used to open new chap­ters in the story is a nar­row field of focus with a blurry halo, sug­gest­ing old daguer­rotypes (sim­i­lar to what I’ve seen recently in The Illu­sion­ist). Dork Report guest critic Snark­bait chris­tened the effect “Ye Old Timey Fil­ter No. 4,” but accord­ing to an inter­view with Deakins in Amer­i­can Cin­e­matog­ra­pher, the fil­ter is his own inven­tion and appro­pri­ately called the Deakinizer.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert FordThe James Gang in hap­pier days

There is fine act­ing all around, and two fun cameos from James Carville and Nick Cave (who cowrote the film’s music). Casey Affleck rounds out an excel­lent year in his career after Gone Baby Gone with a great per­for­mance as Robert Ford, obvi­ously not billed above Brad Pitt but arguably the main char­ac­ter. Sam Rock­well (as Charley Ford) is espe­cially great near the end of the film, as his simple-minded char­ac­ter trag­i­cally breaks down. Pitt makes a charm­ing and earthy, yet plainly socio­pathic Jesse James. James’ curse is that he’s always the smartest man in the room, but one need only wit­ness the par­tic­u­larly unhinged laugh Pitt gives him to see how lunatic and crim­i­nal the man actu­ally is.

I lied, one more com­plaint: Mary-Louise Parker & Zooey Deschanel, both fine, name actors, appear in minia­ture roles with min­i­mal dia­logue. Per­haps their char­ac­ters were sim­i­larly minor in the orig­i­nal novel, but they seem under­served in the film. Per­haps the female pres­ence in the actual lives of these his­tor­i­cal fig­ures was not sig­nif­i­cant, but to return to Dead­wood for a moment, Dead­wood repeat­edly proved it is not his­tor­i­cal revi­sion­ism to include women in a modern-day por­trait of a bygone era.

Offi­cial movie site: jessejamesmovie.warnerbros.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

Blazing Saddles

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Blazing Saddles movie poster

 

Unfor­tu­nately, Blaz­ing Sad­dles is not nearly as funny as I remem­ber from my child­hood. I recall the infa­mous bean-induced fart sequnce being a ver­i­ta­ble sym­phony of bad taste; alas, the real thing is just a minute or so long at most. But it turns won­der­fully crazy near the end, finally becom­ing funny as the cast crashes postmodern-style into another movie set and an actor shouts “Piss on you, I’m work­ing for Mel Brooks!”

Gene Wilder proves his range by gives the polar oppo­site per­for­mance than in Young Franken­stein and The Pro­duc­ers. Stoned mel­low, he gra­ciously sup­ports star Cleavon Lit­tle. Still, Wilder gets to wrap up the pic­ture by kick­ing up his heels (still munch­ing the pop­corn from their movie date) and con­fess­ing his long­ing to ride off into the sun­set with Sher­iff Bart.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

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The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada movie poster

 

Three Buri­als joins Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man as one of my few highly-rated west­erns. Like Dead Man, its tone mean­ders from the darkly comic to the melo­dra­matic, and is at times almost unwatch­ably grue­some. Which does noth­ing to explain why I liked it, I know.

Spe­cial men­tion to Barry Pep­per for tak­ing what must be one of the most thank­less roles in movie his­tory: his char­ac­ter is a onanis­tic racist brute, beaten, dragged by a horse, forced at gun­point to dis­in­ter a corpse, bit­ten by a rat­tlesnake, and not the least of which, spends a good part of the movie with his pants down (come to think of it, so does Dwight Yoakam).