anticipate TRUE GRIT by the Coen brothers

haha are you kidding that looks AMAZING

"that gun's not licensed, McQ!"

"...neither am I!!!!"

"I don't like bears."

There's lots of room to disagree about John Wayne. To me, he wasn't really an actor, but a movie star. He could fill a screen. He could carry a film with his presence. But his dismal failures (like that Ghengis Khan biopic) are pretty much of a piece with his best roles; they are cut from precisely the same cloth, delivered with the same inflections, the same facial expressions, displaying the same level of acting ability: it's the only John Wayne we ever got.

But you could say this about many Hollywood actors then and now. Why hold his failures against them?

plus, as Pleasant Plains suggested, writing that "He could fill a screen. He could carry a film with his presence" is certainly one way of defining screen acting. What do you think Cary Grant and George Clooney do?

To my eyes, the Method has dated far worse than Wayne's star power.

I'll take Wayne's worst over Pacino and DeNiro's worst, thanks

I somehow didn't know that Deakins has never won an Oscar.

http://carpetbagger.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/03/a-q-and-a-with-roger-deakins-the-susan-lucci-of-cinematography/?ref=movies

Larry McMurtry & Diana Ossana discuss:

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/feb/08/talking-about-true-grit/#

Thanks for posting that Morbs, that was pretty cool. Kind of wish they had a video version of the discussion...they change gears pretty sharply in the transcript, lol.
Ossana bringing up the way the story harkens back to childhood adventure novels, but with a girl in the lead kind of hones in on what I love about the movie, and the book...just the fact that this gutsy, serious, determined girl can lead these two men on an adventure, and us...I mean, it shows the possibility of the genre, of female protagonists and it's done in a way that isn't condescending.

And I'm with Larry. I don't really see how it's a story of Rooster's redemption either. Saving Maddie is some kind of redemption but spending the last of his days in a touring gun show with the James brothers hardly seemed redemptive to me, it almost seemed to suggest that maybe there are only acts of kindness, that you can never truly gain redemption? I dunno. But it never seemed as cut and dried to me.

http://jeffbridges.com/true_grit_book/

Finally saw this last night, loved it pretty much unreservedly. It was more brutal than I expected, I had to close my eyes at the tongue wrangling scene. The scene where Rooster Cogburn was galloping through the night to get Mattie treated was both otherworldly and viscerally exciting.

Haven't saw any mention of the sniper scene where LaBeouf says a prayer before shooting Lucky Ned Pepper. I'm sure that's a nod to Barry Pepper's character in 'Saving Private Ryan'.

I read the Portis last week and was amused to discover than Cogburn is in his early 40s (the headstone at the end of the Coens film follows this too), but "built like Grover Cleveland." So he should've been played by Paul Giamatti.

I liked Bridges in this, but Giamatti would have been a good choice too! But he doesn't have much box office draw power, so --

Watching this for the first time and just realized that our own pleasant plains looks a lot like Barry Pepper.

Oh and this rules. The little girl is awesome as are several others.

yay! I love this movie so much!

god this was a great movie ... love how the dialogue was written in a kind of an obsolete vernacular. most fascinating dialogue in a movie in a while, for sure.

not sure what the best line was, maybe a toss-up between "that is to say ... your eye" or "that's a good name!"

Most of the dialogue came directly from the book, that's what made it so great. If you haven't read it, you should check it out.

^^
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bj1DZKOeZhI

"Vámonos, amigos," he whispered, and threw the busted leather flintcraw over the loose weave of the saddlecock. And they rode on in the friscalating dusklight.

;-D

This might be a bit obscure but if you're interested in more background on Quantrill's Raiders, Cole Younger & his involvement with the James gang, this CBS radio docudrama from the 50's does a pretty good job of it:

http://archive.org/details/OTRR_Crime_Classics_Singles - episode 28 "The Younger Brothers and Why Some Of Them Grew No Older" (geddit hur)
(can listen to the ep here online, or it's available on itunes for download too)

just watched this again

i liked it when i first saw it, but i somehow failed to notice that it is unbelievably great

yeah! i rewatched it a few months ago remembering that i liked it a lot when it came out but had still filed it away as minor coens... it really isnt though, its top tier. choked up at the end

yup.

holds up to multiple rewatches for sure. Gets better as time goes on, I think.

What a great movie. Guess I avoided it all these years just b/c it was a Western. Should have immediately watched it after I loved (most of) Buster Scruggs.

Just rewatched this last Saturday with my wife. The attention to detail was superb throughout and I appreciated that the Coens reclaimed this as Maddie's story, instead of Cogburn's.

just watched this a few months back for the first time. the cast is great is my main takeaway. will have to rewatch after some time passes, didn't see it as top-tier coens but not minor coens either.

this was the only Coen brothers movie - other than the ladykillers - that I hadn't seen. maybe I should take the plunge with that turkey soon

the ladykillers has one good performance in it by the black landlady and a total stinkeroo from Tom Hanks. I'd be surprised if you stuck it to the end, as it just progressively sinks to lower and lower levels of badness as the time drags on.

i love the Coens a lot and can't imagine wanting to rewatch The Ladykillers, but there's plenty of time so

I imagine the Coens didn't audition Hanks for the role in Ladykillers, because Hanks was too big a star to audition. Big, big mistake. His complete inability to cope with his role ruined the movie beyond redemption. But, as the Coens no doubt knew, you don't tell that to Tom Hanks during shooting; you swallow hard, take your lumps, and never work with him again.

I thought he was trying to one up Peter Sellers tbh, or, he seems like an OK guy, maybe it was a tribute

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afRFR2UNYzI

Poor Hailee. Her handlers wouldn't even let her sing in her own voice. They had to run it through some filter and drown it in a sea of overproduction. She was v good in the movie, though.

She really was.

I like True Grit but feel like it was a good movie brought down a bit from the upper tier Cohen Brothers oeuvre by the completely useless presence of Matt Damon. I'm enough of a classic western sap to enjoy lots of it though.

I completely forgot Matt Damon was in this!

Matt Damon is fabulous! He handled the comedy like a pro.

yeah, Matt Damon is great in this

his comedy paedophilia wasn't enough to compensate for him being a shit boring actor imo!

This was the era when Matt Damon realized he was a blank and shrewdly started to manipulate it for max impactx.