Category: Western
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Duck, You Sucker! Sergio Leone’s belief in friendship
Few directors are as consistent and determined in sticking to the theme of friendship throughout their filmography as Sergio Leone was. The Italian filmmaker behind such classics like The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and Once Upon a Time in America was always – no matter what – a great believer in the power…
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The real-life tragedy of John Huston’s Misfits
Few movies can reflect and predict – without knowing, of course – the real-life tragedy of the people involved in their making as accurately as John Huston’s off-beat and fatalistic film from 1961, The Misfits, starring Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, Thelma Ritter and Eli Wallach. Huston’s film is drenched in the tragic fate…
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High Noon: Why We Need Unconventional Heroes
There are movies that make history, and then there are movies that are history. Over the last century, few movies have reflected the era they were made in as vividly as Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon did back in 1952. Upon its initial release, the seemingly simple story of a small town sheriff having to confront…
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Musica, Maestro: Remembering Ennio Morricone
We find ourselves today, a few hours after Morricone’s passing, stripped of the presence of a man who was capable of amplifying emotions like no other. Having composed film music for over 60 years, Morricone leaves us with a catalog not of films, but emotions. Rarely have I felt so connected to someone who, like…
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Untouchable
Movies have different ways of communicating with the audience, some prefer to stick to heavy loaded dialogue, others rely mostly on poetry and metaphors, others use music and physical gags, others are founded on story and plot, and finally, there are those that target the audience with only one single element: visuals. Movies are motion…
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How the West Was Won by Clint
There have been numerous articles and reviews that have tackled the obscurity and the powerful kick of Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Western, Unforgiven. Countless film critics and film scholars have used Unforgiven as the prime example of an anti-violence film, a film that used short yet effective spurts of bloody action to convey a message about the theme of…
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How to Get Away with a Stinker
Many people have asked my opinion on what I consider a bad movie, or what makes a director bad. The answer to these two questions could have been simple: Michael Bay and his entire filmography, Zack Snyder and his superhero fascination, M. Night Shyamalan and a big chunk of his last few movies, but in…
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Love Letter to the West
Westerns. John Ford was the master of Westerns. He was THE guy when it came to depicting gunfights and chases on horseback. Sergio Leone might be the director you’d like to think invented the Western genre, but he didn’t. He improved the Spaghetti Western one. The Western genre was all John Ford’s. Westerns at the…
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Son of a Gun
Today’s topic: the not so Spaghetti Western of Sergio Leone. The 1960s were a time of booming ecstasy in European cinema, especially the Italian, German and French, which were producing an average of 112 films every year. It may not seem as much compared to today’s Hollywood productions, but in those times the three countries I…
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No Heroes
Today’s topic: the end of an era in The Wild Bunch (1969). A lot of people consider the Western genre to be boring nowadays. My own generation, the youngsters, seem to be repulsed by the boring scenery, outdated dialogue and predictable action. Sure, Westerns are predictable; the good guy wins, the bad guy dies. The special effects…
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