Photo caption: Goya Robles and Arata Iura in TOKYO COWBOY. Courtesy of Salaryman.
The charming dramedy Tokyo Cowboy centers on a Japanese corporate turnaround artist, Hideki (Arata Iura). Confident that he has the secret sauce to recharge any stagnant brand, he’s got a slick pitch deck (with a snapshot from his own childhood), and he’s engaged to the corporate vice-president he reports to. His company is about to liquidate a money-hemorrhaging cattle ranch in Montana, when he parachutes in for a quick fix. His Japanese beef consultant goes hilariously native, and Hideki, a smart guy, immediately sees that his idea for a quick fix was mistaken. Now unsettled and off the grid in an alien culture, Hideki recalibrates his values and his life goals.
Arata Iura’s performance is exceptional, especially since the character of Hideki is a restrained man from a very reserved culture, a cypher who is dramatically changing internally. Ayako Fujitani is very good a Hideki’s fiancé/boss Keiko. Robin Weigert (Calamity Jane in Deadwood) is excellent as the ranch manager. Jun Kunimura (222 IMDb credits) is hilarious as Hideki’s cattle expert.
Arata Iura and Ayako Fujitani in TOKYO COWBOY. Courtesy of Salaryman.
It’s the first narrative feature for director Marc Marriott, who, with cinematographer Oscar Ignacio Jiménez, creates a Big Sky setting that could reset any of us in need of self-discovery. Some directors would have ruined this story by making the fish-out-water comedy too broad or the self-discovery too self-important, but Marriott strikes the perfect tone. The screenplay was co-written by Ayako Fujitani (who plays Keiko)) and Dave Boyle.
I screened Tokyo Cowboy for the SLO Film Fest, where it won the jury award for Best Narrative Feature. Tokyo Cowboy opens on September 28 at the Lark in Larkspur and on October 25 at the Palm in San Luis Obispo.
Photo caption: Viggo Mortensen in THE DEAD DON’T HUNT. Courtesy of Shout! Studios; photo credit Marcel-Zyskind38.
I sure do like me a western and I admire Viggo Mortensen, so I was very disappointed in The Dead Don’t Hurt, which Mortensen wrote, directed and stars in. Mortensen plays a guy who finds a woman (Vicky Krieps) in San Francisco, takes her to his Nevada homestead, and immediately heads off to the Civil War and must deal with the consequences when he returns. Cliches ensue, culminating in a lousy movie.
The central problem with The Dead Don’t Hurt is that Mortensen, as screenwriter, developed a story where the behavior of the two main characters is not always plausible or understandable and the other characters are all one-dimensional. Consequently, we don’t care about the characters; I will allow that I did care about the villain, a psychopathic villain, whom I wanted to see dead, but he was perhaps the most one-dimensional of the lot. I take notes while I watch movies, and, at one point, I scribbled this is Viggo’s movie; this is Viggo’s fault.
This screenplay was a terrible waste of Garret Dillahunt, Danny Huston and W. Earl Brown, some of our most gifted and colorful character actors, who were assigned to play roles which are essentially cardboard cutouts.
Only Ray McKinnon (Reverend H. W. Smith in Deadwood) gets enough singularity to work with, and he sparkles as a perversely random-behaving judge. (The other good thing about The Dead Don’t Hurt was the music in the closing credits, which was composed by Mortensen.)
Much of the movie rests on Vicky Krieps, whose screen appeal has eluded me. The Luxembourgian actress Krieps received much critical buzz for Phantom Thread, but I wrote then that I wouldn’t cross the street to see her next movie.
I usually watch movies alone, unless I’m with The Wife, and she and I have pre-arranged silent signals when one or both of us want to walk out of a movie. I saw The Dead Don’t Hunt with my friend Keith, and it occurred to me, about 30 minutes in, that we don’t have that kind of signal, and I couldn’t figure out how to see if he wanted to leave, too, without disturbing other patrons.
Keith and I are gonna have to develop a signal; we have been going to movies together for decades, and we’ve sat all the way through bad movies like Bite the Bullet and Le Quattro Volte, but I’m now too old to waste an hour of my remaining lifetime.
[SPOILERS FOLLOW] I usually can write a full review with a spoiler, but I just need to explain elements of cinematic misfire that entirely distracted me from the story. It begins with the rape revenge, which has become one of the laziest of plot devices. The psychopathic bully murders for sport and immediately starts leering at the Krieps character, telegraphing the most obvious movie rape since Billy Jack. She is impregnated in the rape and bears a son. Now, the Civil War was four years long, and human gestation is nine months; this means that when Viggo returns to find his wife with a son, the kid should be three years old. But the kid in the movie is five at the youngest, and more likely six. He doesn’t look or act like a three year old, speaks English, French and a little Spanish, and is learning to write numbers. He’s a six-year-old who is supposed to be three and It’s VERY distracting.
The one novelty in The Dead Don’t Hunt, the one thing I hadn’t seen in a movie before, was a death from syphilis.
When Viggo’s character despondently throws his military medal away, I was wishing he had tossed the script, too.
A scene from Erico Rassi’s SAME OLD WEST. Courtesy of Cinequest.
The contemporary Brazilian western Same Old West begins with two men slugging it out over a woman, before they start hiring gunmen to take out the other. She is the only woman in the film, only on screen for about 45 seconds, and, as one who knows her well observes, she has had bad luck with husbands.
Same Old West takes us into a Brazil that is neither Rio de Janeiro nor the Amazon rainforest. This is a flat and arid land that looks like it could be in Spain, Mexico or the American Southwest. It’s a remote and backward place where hired killers are still call gunmen instead of hit men. The gunmen don’t own a .44 magnum or a Glock or an AK-47 among them – they use their hunting rifles. This is a place where making an escape on horseback is still absolutely normal.
Literally, the plot of Same Old West sounds male-oriented – a bunch of guys hunting each other with gun violence on their minds. But, it’s really about men who have been rejected by women, and their inability to understand it or to move on. They’re aspiring to toxic masculinity, but they’re too laughably pathetic to achieve it. Female audiences will appreciate the sharp critique of maleness at its most dunderheaded.
Same Old West is being characterized as a drama, which isn’t really wrong because it’s about murderous manhunts. But I see it as a dark comedy that skewers male cluelessness. The very sparse and overly formal dialogue, delivered deadpan, is remarkably droll. If you like your humor as dry as the landscape, Same Old West is downright hilarious.
Same Old West is the second feature for writer-director Erico Rassi. It’s a visually striking and richly atmospheric film, with hints of Sergio Leone.
Cinequest hosts the world premiere of Same Old West, which I’ve highlighted in my Best of Cinequest.
A scene from Erico Rassi’s SAME OLD WEST. Courtesy of Cinequest.
Okay, so this is one of those rare movies that had me at the title. One doesn’t automatically think of Jews among the wagon trains, desperadoes and cowpunchers of the Wild West. But, in Jews of the Wild West, documentarian Amanda Kinsey brings us an anthology of impressively well-researched Jewish experiences on the Western frontier.
Kinsey starts off with a saloon girl who married an iconic gunslinger (and buried him in Colma’s Jewish cemetery) and the marketer of the clothing item most identified with the American West (hint – not Wranglers). As a Western history buff, I was familiar with those first two stories, but then I started learning a lot:
Why many of the first mayors of frontier towns were Jewish;
How Eastern European occupational restrictions on Jews prepared them for a pivotal role in the development of the great Denver and Greeley, Colorado, cattle stockyards;
That most Jews found markedly less antisemitism in the West than in the East;
That teenage Golda Meir ran away to high school in Denver.
My jaw dropped at the shocking story of the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society, which in 1881-84, until taken over by the reputable United Hebrew Charities, was helping new Jewish emigrants resettle in the remote West. The seeming benevolence, it turns out, was motivated by an earlier wave of now prosperous Jews who didn’t want the impoverished Orthodox arrivals from Eastern Europe to challenge capitalism and make them look bad.
Interestingly, filmmaker Kinsey, a longtime NBC News producer and five-time Emmy winner, is NOT herself Jewish.
I attended a screening of Jews of the Wild West at the San Luis Obispo Jewish Film Festival that included a Q&A with Kinsey and local historians. Jews of the Wild West is streaming on Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube.
Photo caption: Clint Eastwood in THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES. Courtesy of Warner Bros.
A top tier Western – and one of my personal favorites. is coming up on Turner Classic Movies on April 2 – Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales. I venerate Westerns, and I rate John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Searchers and Fred Zinneman’s High Noon at the top of the genre; The Outlaw Josey Wales fits in the tier just below, among the rest of Ford’s portfolio and those of Anthony Mann, Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Leone, Howard Hawks, Budd Boetticher and other masters. Those masters include Clint Eastwood himself, having gone on to win the Best Picture and Best Director Oscars for Unforgiven.
Clint plays Josey Wales, a Missouri farmer whose family is massacred by terrorist partisans at the beginning of the Civil War, leading Josey to join rival irregulars. At the end of the war, Wales refuses to surrender and heads West to restart his life. But his old enemies hound him, and there is a price on his head which draws bounty hunters. As Josey seeks sanctuary westward, he is joined by a motley convoy of Native Americans and White settlers, which Josey defends against outlaw bands and hostile Native Americans. The dramatic tension revolves around whether Josey will survive, and, if so, whether he will find peace.
Josey has blood on his hands from his part in wartime atrocities. He’s no longer looking for trouble, just trying to find a place where he can be left alone. But violence follows him – from the men that are hunting him and the dangers that he will encounter on the journey. Josey says, “Whenever I get to likin’ someone, they ain’t around long.” A companion retorts, “I notice when you get to DISlikin’ someone they ain’t around for long neither.“
Will Sampson and Clint Eastwood in THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES. Courtesy of Warner Bros.
The sympathetic portrayal of Native Americans (by Native American actors) is another hallmark of The Outlaw Josey Wales. Josey’s main buddy is Lone Watie, played by Chief Dan George (actually a Native Canadian Squamish) in a sparkling performance. Six-foot-five Creek actor Will Sampson (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) and Navajo actor Geraldine Kearnes are also excellent.
Josey must run a gauntlet of the scariest movie bad guys since Kansas City Confidential – Bill McKinney, John Davis Chandler, Len Lesser, John Quade. It’s such a dastardly slew of baddies that it leaves a more complicated role for John Vernon (villain of Point Blank and countless episodes of Mission: Impossible and Dean Wormer in Animal House).
Sam Bottoms play an ill-fated and callow pal of Josey’s. Sondra Locke’s character represents purity and innocence as a counterpoint to Josey’s jaded world view. The cast is peppered with recognizable character actors: Royal Dano, Sheb Wooley, John Mitchum.
Philip Kaufman had co-written the screenplay, and as director, had cast the movie and prepared the shoot, but Eastwood, impatient with what he viewed as too many takes, had Kaufman fired and took over himself. This was Clint’s fifth picture as a director and his second Western (after High Plains Drifter). Eastwood’s work as director is excellent, but it’s important to look at Josey Wales in light of both men’s contributions. In the long run, Kaufman’s career didn’t suffer – he went on to direct The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Right Stuff and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Clint Eastwood in THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES. Courtesy of Warner Bros.
What about a former Confederate soldier as hero? The source material for the screenplay was a novel by the racist propagandist Asa Earl Carter, who co-wrote George Wallace’s “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever” speech. However, in Kaufman’s screenplay, Josey isn’t a hater of people because of what they were born as, he hates for what they have done to him and his loved ones. Apolitical, he joins the side that didn’t kill his family. Asa Earl Carter probably wouldn’t have liked that – or the sympathetic portrayal of Native Americans as equals to whites. The Outlaw Josey Wales is now accepted to be a revisionist Western . Eastwood has since said that he considers it an anti-war film, which has much merit.
One more historical note, the Civil War soldiers depicted were not regular Union or Confederate troops, but guerilla raiders that came out of the Bleeding Kansas conflict. These units did exist on both sides in Kansas and Missouri, and were noted for their massacres of unarmed civilians as well as combatants. Josey joins up with one of the most notorious, William T. “Bloody Bill” Anderson. As both a victim and a perpetrator, Josey has seen the most inhumane human behavior.
On set, Clint Eastwood and Sondra Locke began a 14-tear relationship (which did not end well).
Qualified as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the Library of Congress, The Outlaw Josey Wales has been selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. Jerry Fielding’s music was nominated for an Academy Award. The Outlaw Josey Wales plays frequently on TV and is streamable from HBO (subscription), Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube.
Jonathan Majors and Zazie Beetz in THE HARDER THEY FALL. Courtesy of Netflix.
The Harder They Fall is a neo-spaghetti western, pretty much like Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, except that all the gunslingers are of African ancestry. As in Taratinoesque film, there is lots of bloody violence prefaced by clever speechifying.
Technically, this is a revenge film, with a heinous act in the opening scene sure to to be avenged in the last. But it’s really an excuse for some of the finest Black screen actors (Regina King, Idris Elba, LaKeith Stanfield, Delroy Lindo) to don cowboy gear and engage in the Western genre.
The protagonist is played by Jonathan Majors, who broke through in The Last Black Man in San Francisco, and it’s great to see him leading a Hollywood movie. Because I don’t watch much TV, I’m late to the party in recognizing Zazie Beetz as a compelling screen presence; man, she’s a force.
Deon Cole (Blackish, I’m Fine, Thank You or Asking) so good in broadly comic roles, gets to show off his dramatic chops.
There is plenty of humor sprinkled throughout and one LOL moment when the protagonists ride into a White Town. That joke is an homage to one in Blazing Saddles.
There’s nothing original about The Harder They Fall except for the all-Black cast. There’s nothing memorable about it, either – just 2 hours and 19 minutes of amusing shoot ’em up with some really excellent actors.
Photo caption: Tim Blake Nelson in OLD HENRY. Courtesy of Shout! Factory.
The fine western Old Henry is centered on Henry (Tim Blake Nelson), a widowed settler in the wilds of 1906 Oklahoma. Henry is content with being a solitary sod buster, but he has serious skills from a violent past, and both the past and the skills are unknown to his teen son (Gavin Lewis). The son is brash and impulsive, and desperate to escape the drudgery and isolation of the homestead.
A man badly wounded by a gunshot (Scott Haze) turns up with a satchel full of cash ( (obviously contraband). Henry nurses him, and chooses to hide him when three armed men show up, led by Ketchum ( Stephen Dorff), who claims to be a sheriff. Ketchum knows that his target is in Henry’s cabin, and he recognizes that Henry is more than a dirt farmer. When Ketchum returns with reinforcements, a climactic gun battle is inevitable.
One wild card is the wounded man, with his uncertain identity and motives. Another is the son, rigorously sheltered by Henry and ignorant of the cost of real violence. He’s spoiling to get into a fight – and that is not helpful.
Tim Blake Nelson, with nary a wasted word or action, commands the screen as the ever steely Henry. I saw Old Henry in personat the Nashville Film Festival, where Nelson revealed that his performance was informed by “restraint and stillness” because, for Henry, “any exposure means vulnerability”. So, Blake made Henry “laconic in actions as well as words”.
Nelson is a magnificent actor, who has elevated many a character role (Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?). Here he gets the lead role in a movie that premiered at the Venice Film Festival. Good for him.
Old Henry is the the first feature written and directed by Potsy Ponciroli. And it’s a well-crafted film. The filmmakers get the period right. The art direction and the production design are flawless, and the weapons have the necessary heft. Old Henry was filmed on a cattle farm in Tennessee, but it sure looks like Oklahoma.
If you appreciate a good western, then Old Henry is your movie. The big shootout is thrilling, and Tim Blake Nelson is so good as a man who knows he can’t have redemption and only seeks some solace. Old Henry is now playing nationally, including for one-week run at San Francisco’s Roxie.
The Fastest Guitar Alive, a would-be comedy western, is a Roy Orbison vehicle. Indeed the only reason to watch even a few minutes of The Fastest Guitar Alive is to see what Ray Orbison looked like without his sunglasses.
It’s all supposed to take advantage of Orbison’s popularity, along the lines of an Elvis Presley movie or a Ricky Nelson movie (or Johnny Cash’s Five Minutes to Live). Problem is, Orbison’s mystique was based on the deep emotions embedded in his haunting voice – and there’s none of that in this movie. Orbison performs six songs, but none of his good ones.
What substitutes for a plot is that Orbison, with a gizmo combination guitar-rifle, cavorts around the Old West with a Medicine Show run by Steve (Sammy Jackson) and enriched by a handful of saloon girls.
Jackson, who starred in the television series No Time for Sergeants and the TV movie Li’l Abner, doesn’t bring much to the party. The film begins with a cringe-inducing racist spoof on an Indian chief (the venerable Iron Eyes Cody). Veteran character John Doucette must have wondered what he had stumbled into.
Oddly, this movie seems out of place for 1967. It seems like it would have fit better earlier in the decade (although it would still be bad).
With the contemporary Western thriller Wind River, screenwriter Taylor Sheridan has delivered another masterpiece, this time in his first effort as director. Wind River was probably my most anticipated film of that year because I pegged Sheridan’s previous movie Hell or High Water as the best movie of 2016. Wind River doesn’t disappoint and was one of the best movies of 2017.
The story is set in and around Wyoming’s Wind River Indian Reservation. Cory (Jeremy Renner) is a professional hunter who finds the body of a native American teenage girl. To find out what happened to her and who is responsible, the tribal police chief Ben (Graham Greene) calls for help from the feds. That assistance arrives in the form of FBI agent Jane (Elizabeth Olsen), an inexperienced city slicker who has no clue how to survive in the lethal elements of the wild country. She is canny enough to understand that she needs the help of Cory, who knows every inch of the back country. He has his own reason – very important to the story – to solve the mystery, and the unlikely duo embark on a dangerous investigation, which they know will end in a man hunt.
The man hunt leads to a violent set piece that Sheridan directs masterfully. There’s a sudden escalation of tension, then apparent relief and then an explosion of action. Deadly chaos envelops several characters, but we’re able to follow it all clearly, while we’re on the edges of our seats.
Jeremy Renner’s performance as Cory is brilliant. Cory is a man whose life has been redirected by a family tragedy. He’s a Western stoic of few words, but – unusual for his type – an individual who deals with his grief in a very specific and self-aware way. Playing a character who reloads his own rounds, Renner is able to deliver hard-ass, determined efficiency along with some unexpected tenderness.
Olsen is also very good as Jane who understands that she may appear to be the bottom of the FBI’s barrel because she is a woman and very green and tiny. Resolute and spunky, she moves past what others might take as a slight because no unaided outsider is going to be able to navigate the harsh environment and the culture of the reservation. She isn’t trying to make a name for herself, but just to take responsibility in the old-fashioned way that we would expect from characters played by Glenn Ford, Gregory Peck, John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. She’s got to do the right thing.
As Martin, the dead girl’s father, Gil Birmingham (Hell or High Water) has two unforgettable scenes. His first scene is phenomenal, as he processes the worst possible news with an outsider, Jane, and then with his friend, Cory. Graham Greene and Tantoo Cardinal are also excellent. Kelsey Asbille and Jon Bernthal are also stellar in a flashback of the crime.
Sheridan and cinematographer Ben Richardson (Beasts of the Southern Wild) make great use of the Big Sky country, with the jagged topography of its mountains and the feral frigidity of its forests. Wind River opens as Cory hunts in spectacular postcard scenery; when we first see the reservation, we are jarred – this is a very bad place.
Taylor Sheridan has a gift for writing great, great movie dialogue:
“Who’s the victim today? Looks like it’s gonna be me.”
and
“This isn’t the land of backup, Jane. This is the land of you’re on your own.”
When Cory says, “This isn’t about Emily”, we know that this is precisely about Emily. When Cory says, “I’m a hunter”, we know exactly what his intentions are – and so does Martin.
Sheridan hates that, in much of our society, people are disposable. He has explored that theme in Sicario, Hell or High Water and now Wind River. Wind River begins with a title explaining that the story is inspired by actual events, and ends with a particularly horrifying non-statistic. I’ve also written an essay on Sheridan’s filmmaking signatures, the films of Tayler Sheridan.
Smart, layered and intelligent, Wind River is another success from one of America’s fastest-rising filmmakers. It’s available to stream from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Peter Sarsgaard in Michael Tyburski’s THE SOUND OF SILENCE. Courtesy of SFFILM
This week, I’ll be at the Mill Valley Film Festival: it’s an early look at the most prestigious movies of the year. Watch for my coverage of 63 Up, Jojo Rabbit, Frankie, Where’s My Roy Cohn? and Marriage Story. If you miss the big movies at the MVFF, you can at least stream some of the Best Movies of 2019 – So Far – The Last Black Man in San Francisco, They Shall Not Grow Old, Amazing Grace and Booksmart are all available to be streamed.
OUT NOW
Downtown Abbey is a satisfying wrap-up for fans of the beloved PBS series.
The Sound of Silence is an engrossing character study starring Peter Sarsgaard as a man confident in his obsession until… It’s had a limited run at San Jose’s 3Below, and you can stream it on Amazon, iTunes and Vudu.
ON VIDEO
My Stream of the Week is the evocative and thought-provoking German drama Western.Western can be streamed from Amazon (included with Prime), iTunes, YouTube and Google Play.
ON TV
On October 5, Turner Classic Movies will air the 1950 version of M, directed by Joseph Losey. This is a remake of Fritz Lang’s great 1931 M with Peter Lorre. The Losey version is not a masterpiece like the original, and I find it pretty odd. However, Los Angeles’ storied Bradbury Building, which has been in many a movie, was never been as gloriously revealed from basement to roof as in M. The Bradbury Building and the film as a whole benefit from the cinematography of Ernest Laszlo; Laszlo also shot D.O.A., The Well, The Steel Trap, Stalag 17, The Naked Jungle, Kiss Me Deadly and While the City Sleeps, before being Oscar-nominated eight times for more respectable, but lesser films. The cast is filled with film noir faves – Raymond Burr, Norman Lloyd, Howard Da Silva, Steve Brodie and Luther Adler.
