Western

The Ballad of Lefty Brown

/ / Home Video
  • Title: The Ballad of Lefty Brown
  • IMDb: link

The Ballad of Lefty Brown Blu-ray reviewWriter/director Jared Moshe‘s The Ballad of Lefty Brown is a passable, if forgettable, western starring Bill Pullman as Lefty Brown, a screw-up who vows to avenge the death of his closest friend (Peter Fonda). Meanwhile others, including the man’s widow (Kathy Baker) are more than willing to believe the crime was committed by Brown himself despite the scarcity of evidence (or credible motive). The performances are solid, and the western vistas are pleasant to watch, so even if the journey doesn’t lead anywhere all that interesting it at least makes for a modest diversion.

The film follows the cowboy’s misadventures, eventually leading to him discovering the real reason his friend was murdered and seeking vengeance against one of the most powerful men in the territory. The idea of turning the dimwitted sidekick into the central character goes against the western template, but that’s really the only place The Ballad of Lefty Brown strays from the expected in a rather straightforward revenge tale.

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Firefly – Serenity

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Firefly – Serenity
  • wiki: link

 

“Now I did a job. I got nothing but trouble since I did it, not to mention more than a few unkind words as regard to my character so let me make this abundantly clear: I do the job, and then I get paid.”

 

Firefly - Serenity television review

This week’s Flashback Friday post takes us into the black and the two-hour pilot episode of Joss Whedon‘s Firefly. While it turned out that Fox could indeed take the sky from us, the show’s introduction (which the network, in all their genius, chose to run at the end rather than the beginning of the show’s short run) does a great job of setting up the universe of Firefly and introducing us the Captain Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) and the crew of Serenity: the loyal first officer (Gina Torres), her wacky pilot husband (Alan Tudyk), the bubbly engineer (Jewel Staite), the gruff mercenary (Adam Baldwin), the space hooker (Morena Baccarin), and their guests in the man of god (Ron Glass), big city doctor (Sean Maher), and a girl in a box (Summer Glau). And, not to be overlooked, the show’s eighth character in Serenity herself which would be home for so many of us that fell immediately in love with the space-western.

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Hostiles

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Hostiles
  • IMDb: link

Hostiles movie reviewHostiles is a wagon train movie, without the wagon train. Christian Bale stars as Capt. Joseph J. Blocker, a career solider who has spent the better part of two decades fighting Native Americans in the late 19th Century. A reluctant Blocker is ordered to escort an old enemy (Wes Studi) and his family (Adam Beach, Xavier Horsechief, Q’orianka Kilcher, and Tanaya Beatty) from New Mexico to Montana and deliver them safely home after years of being prisoners of the Union Army. Along the way, the group will pick-up a woman (Rosamund Pike) whose family was brutally killed in the film’s opening scene and a prisoner (Ben Foster) with a connection to Blocker’s past.

After the initial attack on the Quaid farm, Hostiles falls back into a slow burn of a film as former enemies and strangers will have to rely on each other to make the dangerous trek across country. Writer/director Scott Cooper‘s adapted screenplay doesn’t reinvent the wheel and relies mostly on strong performances to carry a rather straightforward plot that never quite succeeds in presenting Blocker and his prisoners as equals due to the vastly superior amount of time the camera spends on the former compared to the later.

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Three Amigos

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Three Amigos
  • IMDb: link

Three Amigos DVD reviewToday’s Throwback Thursday post takes us back to the 1986 comedy which united Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, and Martin Short as a trio of silent B-movie stars mistaken for the western gunfighters they portray on film. In many ways the film proved to be a precursor to Galaxy Quest (or, as I like to call it, the best Star Trek movie ever made) which took the same premise of Hollywood stars and threw them into a world they had only pretended to live in. While Three Amigos is no Galaxy Quest, the zany comedy still holds up relatively well three decades later with the trio’s amusing antics, the accidental death of the Invisible Horseman, and a trio of original songs from Randy Newman.

Borrowing the basic set-up from Seven Samurai, a woman from a small Mexican village (Patrice Martinez) seeks the help of gunfighters to defend her home against the bandit El Guapo (Alfonso Arau) and his outlaws. Watching part of a film starring the western heroes, and believing them to be gunfighters, Carmen enlists the help of the Amigos who mistakenly believe they are being offered a role in a prestigious film with an in-famous co-star. Hilarity ensues.

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Silverado

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Silverado
  • IMDb: link

Silverado movie reviewToday’s throwback Thursday post takes us on the road to Silverado. Lawrence Kasdan‘s post-modern western about four strangers (Kevin Kline, Scott Glenn, Kevin Costner, and Danny Glover) coming together to fight injustice in a western town ruled over by corrupt sheriff (Brian Dennehy) and greedy landowner (Ray Baker) is as entertaining today as when it was released in theaters 32 years ago.

Shot on location New Mexico by cinematographer John Bailey and set to the Academy Award nominated score by Bruce Broughton, Silverado is a love letter to the classic western focusing on themes of frontier justice, hard choices, and standing up for what’s right. Each of the four characters is given their own arc as Paden (Kline) finds his loyalties tested, Emmett (Glenn) and Mal (Glover) both stand up for family, and Jake (Costner) fights his own impulsive nature. The film is peppered with entertaining supporting roles from the likes of John Cleese, Rosanna Arquette, Linda Hunt, Jeff Goldblum, Lynn Whitfield, Amanda Wyss, and Jeff Fahey as the menacing Tyree.

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