Alex and I wound up watching a few John Wayne westerns while I was visiting, sort of. We started watching The Searchers, but he had to Skype with someone, so he only saw the first 30 minutes. Which is why when he asked me what happened I told him bears ate everyone. If he can't be arsed to awtch, then I can't be arsed to tell him the real ending. We did watch Fort Apache, but we were also playing chess, and Alex was chatting with friends online, and texting with another friend on his phone. Which explains why I kicked his ass so easily (I'm not remotely good, but neither is he. A true chess master would weep watching us play). He wasn't interested in The Cowboys, so I watched that while he was at work. I wasn't that interested either, but my dad wanted to tell me something about it, but didn't want to spoil it*.
I did end up having problems with all three movies. with The Searchers, I didn't like that Ethan, having spent the whole movie proclaiming that his niece is no longer his kin because she was abducted by Native Americans, and seeming set on killing her, is the one who gets to carry her back to the closest thing she has left to family. Marty spent the whole movie insisting he was going to save her, wouldn't let Ethan kill her, risked his neck sneaking into the camp to rescue her, killed Scar, nearly lost the girl he loved, I really think that should have been his right. Yeah, ethan needed something to show he's not a complete misanthropic ass, and he's still isolated from everyone around him, but it still bugged me. I'm normally a fan of redemption stories, but I didn't feel like there had been the proper set-up for the character turn. He'd been gradually softening towards Marty (a little), but I hadn't seen any sign he'd changed his mind as to whether Debbie was worth saving.
With Fort Apache, I couldn't understand Captain York adopting mannerisms of the late Colonel Thursday. Sure, Thursday didn't abandon his men, he rode back to their position and died with them. But they only died because of his foolishness. He wouldn't show Cochise proper respect, which lead to fighting, then he wouldn't listen to York's advice on what wasw a poor tactical choice (trying to fight guerilla fighters with European war style tactics). I didn't understand why they'd glorified the whole thing until Dad pointed out to me if Thursday's arrogance, bullheadedness, and stupidity were pointed out, it would reflect poorly on the Army as a whole, and emphasize how meaningless the deaths of his men were. This way they are glorified as brave men who did their duty best they can (which they were), rather than brave guys who died because their commander was an idiot. I still don't see any reason to start wearing a hat like Thursday, or using his 'Any questions?' conversation ender.
The Cowboys isn't nearly as good a movie as the other two, but that climactic gun battle where the boys kill Bruce Dern's gang of scum was troubling. Dern's crew were bad guys, no doubt, and in Westerns, bad guys tend to wind up dead. So if the kids didn't do it, someone else would have had to, but they might not have arrived in time to stop Dern from profiting from all the cattle they'd stolen. Still, with the boys doing it, it's like a kids game where someone switched their cap pistols with real ones. It's a rite of passage I guess, but it's spooky to see a bunch of kids cheerfully gunning down a bunch of people.
* He wanted to tell me that Bruce Dern says that movie was the worst career move he ever made because after you kill John Wayne in a film, you get typecast as a villain.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment