The Harder They Fall

A western from a couple years ago where Idris Elba plays uber-outlaw Rufus Buck, the nemesis to many but particularly Nat Love, who he tortured as a kid. A hint of O Brother Where Art Thou vibes seeping out of a hard core western / redemption story. Mix in the land rush west and racism and you get plenty of motivation and complexity to keep you going. The basic plot follows Nat Love as he seeks out and kills everyone who was part of that Rufus Buck torture gang. When Buck gets out of jail, he has but on job left before he can leave outlaw life forever...

4 stars (out of 5)

The Magnificent Seven

A town on the western frontier during gold rush days is being bullied by a land owner. Townspeople are being killed and land being stolen in service of said landowner gaining control of local gold mines. Enter Denzel Washington as bounty hunter / gun for hire (with his own beef to pick with said land owner) as charismatic savior of the town. Washington rounds up a cadre of "tough customers" to help him in his deposing (disposing?) of bad land owner. All of this you know exactly from the beginning, and you know exactly how it will play out. And yet somehow I still found this enjoyable and fresh. Maybe because a western is so rare that even a formulaic one is novel. Maybe because of the all star cast. Maybe because after midnight on a holiday break my bar for excellence is quite low. Regardless, without using the word excellence in a direct connection to the film, I do enjoy me a good western with requisite bad-guy heroes saving a town from bad-guy varmints.
4 stars

Django Unchained

Billed as a modern spaghetti western, Quentin Tarantino puts his own stamp on the genre. Not actually a spaghetti western since it was filmed in Wyoming, not in Italy, the feel is pretty good. Of course, there is more blood splatter here than in the total of all Sergio Leone's films. The story follows German bounty hunter Christoph Waltz and recently freed slave Jamie Foxx on a journey of acquiring wealth through their bounty business and then using that wealth to find and free Foxx's wife. The barrier is wacko landowner Leonardo DiCaprio. So the story itself is not amazing, but the portrayal of the ever-present, oppressive violence toward slaves is a stark reminder of the history we all share. And while Tarantino contextualizes this violence in the framework of the wild west which is violent already, and throws in some wacky comedy and blaxploitation undercurrents to allow us to emotionally detach from the horror. If you are prepared for the graphic nature of the violence, this is worth seeing.
4 stars (out of 5)

The Warrior's Way

Probably the best way to describe this is as a samurai western. A member of an elite assassin group (the Sad Flutes) decides that he has had enough killing and escapes to the new world. He lands in a dust bowl ghost town where he is suddenly playing the role of asian Shane. The feel of this movie hits all the right tones as we get an alternately spaghetti western and asian score backdropping gun/sword battles that elicit impressions of watching good anime. Somehow it all worked for me.
3 stars (out of 5)

Cowboys & Aliens

I was looking forward to this movie, then I waited too long and lost interest and heard how dumb it was, and now am quite pleased having actually seen it. Of course aliens visit earth in other eras besides the present and the future. In this case, I would have liked to see these aliens up against the dinosaurs and some sort of "ran out of gas" situation in their space ship. But I digress. This is a clever story and it unfolds nicely. I would have edited 15-20 minutes out and I could even name scenes that were unnecessary (which is unusual for me). But in the end, that doesn't break the film. I like that the cowboys, the outlaws and the Indians team up to fight the aliens. I like that the aliens like gold and that is their sole purpose for being here. I think it is too bad that the cowboys needed their own good alien to help defeat the bad alien. Actually, they only needed the good alien to explain everything. I think they could have won on their own. But that is a creative choice I suppose. This was a good summer film and if you didn't see it last summer, make sure to see it this one.
4 stars (out of 5)