This Will Be A Long Weekend

I'm watching my dad's dogs for him while he's away this weekend. Yes, it's Day 1 of Dogwatch Also known as, "Calvin Goes Insane In 4 Days". Anyway, I tried watching The Crazies yesterday. Upon reflection, I probably should have watched The Man From Laramie instead. I was surprised that the movie was more about the main characters trying to escape the containment established by the military than evading their former friends, now driven daffy by an accidentally released biological weapon. There is quite a bit of killing the infected types, but the threat of the military overshadowed it. When Timothy Olyphant and his deputy are fighting off attacks, I was wondering if the commotion was going to bring down the guys with machine guys and attack helicopters. Early on, when the citizens are being rounded up and moved here and there, a few folks who I guess had avoided apprehension drive a truck through the fences and start fighting back. Then several of the other civilians attack the soliders, or rush towards the feeling helis. It reminded me of one of those scenes in 28 Weeks Later where the soliders can't figure out who's infected and who isn't, except these soldiers didn't care. They just shot everyone anyway. Watching the whole thing I felt this was an important lesson in transparency by the authorities, rather than the usual "hide their culpability" dog-and-pony show. Perhaps if the official types had bothered to explain what was happening, rather than forcibily separating mothers from children and such, things wouldn't have gotten so out of hand. Then it turned out the military was just killing everyone, so that fell apart. Transparency would have been kind of pointless with that objective. Timothy Olyphant doesn't work for me here. He can do the badass stuff, but when he needs to show sincerity (such as expressing his regrets for killing a man at the beginning) it rings false. I feel like he has a permanent smirk, as though he's pulling one over on somebody (the other characters? us? I don't know). It's like Vincent Price in The Last Man on Earth. When he's being eerie, or possibly nuts from solitude, it worked. When he tried to show affection for his children in a flashback, it didn't.