Blood Meridian

 

Happy Native Resistance Day!

 

Quick Shots: Dust

I will now do my best to explain the film Dust.

It is a UK-Italian-German-Spanish-Macedonian spaghetti western.  

Yup, that might actually be the best way to sum this one up!

It’s actually pretty good, a nice mix of action, sex, and a hint of artistic flourish that you love in the cool spaghetti westerns of the 1970’s, although this one was released in 2001.  The narrative structure has been described as Cubist; it hops time frames and viewpoints like mad.  At first you might not realize you are watching a western, but hang in there!

Joseph Fiennes (Shakespeare in Love and every historical drama you loved) and David Wenham (Lord of the Rings, 300, Van Helsing, etc) star, which is way more acting chops than you might expect.  The story interestingly starts in the American west then ends up in the Balkan Wars of the early 1900s (and you may recall that pre-9/11 the Balkans were center of armed conflict, genocide, and geopolitical posturing between crumbling superpowers, whereas today most people either can’t find them on a map or vaguely know that Donald Trump’s 3rd wife is from there).

Great acting in an art film / western with sex and gunfights  Go see it already!

Quick Shots: Amazon's Edge

Edge was part of a plan that Amazon had when it was first getting into original programming. They produced a big group of pilots and put them out at once, then waited to see what people watched.  There were a lot of short movies, including one based on the long running Edge western series by George G. Gilman.  Edge set out to be the grittiest, bloodiest, most violent paperback western series ever.  The few I’ve paged through were… okay.  Some people loved them, but I never saw how it differentiated itself from all the other paperback western series.

So what was the Edge film like?  It was… okay.  Portraying Edge is Max Martini, who did this film between David Mamet’s The Unit and Tony Scott’s 13 Hours.  Martini has great acting chops with a good script and a good director, as you would see in the work that bookended this one.  Unfortunately here he’s working with Shane Black, who can be great (The Nice Guys, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Lethal Weapon 1 & 2) but occasionally turns out bullshit (The Predator).  From both a visual and story standpoint, this one is very mediocre, where not derivative; at some point Edge appears to land in the “Tree of Woe” from Conan the Barbarian. Somehow there is a chastity belt involved, and thus the scene below.  Meh, go watch something else.

(Just found- a great summary of the Edge series!)

What in Tarnation is That Dirty Black Bag?

 NEW WESTERN!!!  NEW WESTERN!!! NEW WESTERN!!!

Hopefully I can watch and give a review soon.

Premiers 3/10?  That's kind funny.

Guns and Guts! A Better Than Expected Wild Bunch Ripoff

I may have found the perfect western- or at least the perfect guilty pleasure western.  Las Viboras Cambian de Peil, known in English as "Guns and Guts", is a 1974 Spaghetti western homage to Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch with a big slice of western decadence on the side.  Excepting that it was made in Mexico.  I swear I've seen the term "Tortilla Western" somewhere, but I'm not sure if that's a real expression or a "build the wall" douchebag style term.  Regardless, the film has a real Eurotrash feel to it, with a hero ("El Pistolero") looking a bit more like an Italian fashion model than a hardened gunslinger.  It works, because while El Pistolero makes his living with a gun, his real passion in life is prostitutes (just like his Mama!).  This sets the stage for a regular rotation of nude or scantily clad saloon girls and soiled doves making their way through the film.  The title could have been "Guns and Guts and Boobs".

Keep in mind that there are still plenty of both guns and guts.  Shootouts are frequent and increase in violence each time.  I get a sense that director Rene Cardona sat down with his visual effects guys and said "can you get me 50% of The Wild Bunch look on 10% of the budget?", and they did a decent job.  The blood tends to leak out of the squibs instead of splatter, and it's a little more orange than you would think, but it's effective.  The final gunfight is in some ways a direct rip off of the cataclysmic ending of The Wild Bunch.

What's that, you say?  What's the plot?  We don't need to stinking plot!  Just kidding.  It's a tough plot to explain, since the "hero" has by the end quadruple or quintuple crossed just about everyone in the film, setting up an assassination so he can retire to a found a personal brothel in Montana.  I think it was Montana, there were lots of breasts on the screen at the time and I think I lost track of the details.

It's that kind of movie. Don't sweat the details, just sit back and enjoy.  Currently found on Tubi, another good review found here.

PS- Google translate is stymied by the original Spanish title, it may be something like "The Serpent Sheds It's Skin".

Typical scene from the film

Crossed: Garth Ennis takes on Blood Meridian

In the middle of a resurging pandemic with a non-zero chance of a civil war in the next year, I decided to read Garth Ennis’ Crossed.  

Most people likely know Garth Ennis from the books he’s written that have gone on to be television series (Preacher on AMC and The Boys on Amazon).  Ennis’ big jump into comics was in fact with Preacher, way back in 1994, where he explicitly set out to write a western, but turned it on it’s side with the modern time period, metaphysical plot, crude humor, and general insanity.

 

Ennis’ work comes in two flavors- derivative nonsense (Streets of Glory) and pure genius (Saint of Killers).  Sometimes he manages to do both in the same book (Punisher: Born).  From the outside Crossed looks like something completely derivative, just being Ennis’ take on the ever popular Zombie Apocalypse.  Once I got a few issues in it became clear that just as Preacher is inspired by a broad brush of western tropes, Crossed is inspired by Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

 

In this story an unknown event infects a mass of the population.  Rather than turning them to zombies, it strips away social constructs like morality, guilt, or conscience, leaving nothing but rage and depravity.  The infection leaves a cross-shaped rash on their faces; someone who is infected is referred to as having “crossed” over.  A group of survivors make their way through the wilderness to safety, dogged for hundreds of miles by a pack of Crossed.

 

There’s a point in the story where a group of Crossed makes an attack, and it immediately looked like the Indian attack that broke up Glanton’s gang in Blood Meridian: 

“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”

 

Ennis’ nine issue first story of Crossed is a horrible, hopeful, and brilliant western.  It'll break your heart.

Quickshots- Yellow Hill: The Stranger's Tale

I really tried to like this short film but... ugh, it is terrible.  Brutal, ugly, painful, no fun at all.  Which is a shame, because it stars Bai Ling, an actress that I really enjoy and don't see nearly enough on the screen.  Yellow Hill is a 15 minute short tale of revenge and people doing horrible things to each other.  The schtick is that it involves a Chinese woman in the West, rather than the white woman who is usually victimized in twisted and ugly revenge tales, but that variation alone doesn't rescue the film.  It can be seen over at Vimeo, on Facebook, or the vid below, but why would you want to?  If anyone out there likes it, let me know why.

La Ley del Revolver- Like Louis L’Amour, but with Nudity & Evisceration

So I finally figured out where Rafael Gallur publishes his fantastic western art- Mexican comic books, like La Ley del Revolver.  While western comics are few and far between here in the US, they are apparently all the rage south of the border.  

The art is simple, and that’s a good thing.  It’s like Mexico somehow skipped the Jack Kirby "everything is kinetic and crazy" movement, and then skipped the Joss Whedon decompressed comics movement that followed.  They just kept on drawing as if they were doing comic strips.  And while I love the changes and experiments in comics art that take place here in the US, I keep reading these little books and thinking, “huh, these are just fun.” 

Fun, that is, if your definition of fun involves constant sex and Tarantino-levels of violence.  The first fight scene I read involved one cowboy fighting off three bounty hunters.  He cut one’s head off with a bowie knife, threw the knife through a second’s chest, then set the third on fire before smashing his head to pieces on a rock. 

La Ley del Revolver sure isn’t going to win and Eisner or a Spur award any time soon, but they are a fun read, like sinking into a Louis L’Amour novel (if his characters were frequently naked and eviscerated).  

(and if you like these covers, there's a great collection of them over at Comicvine)

There Is So Much Wrong with All-Star Western 21

As I have recently begun to recall my fondness for westerns I took a chance and picked up a copy of All-Star Western.  I have glanced at it occasionally in the last few months, enough to see that the story had truly moved West (yay!) while also including Booster Gold from mainstream DC (weird).  I picked up All-Star Western 21, hoping to see a return to the old days of the Jonah Hex comic, even if men in tights occasionally strolled through.  I read through and found myself asking one simple question…

WHAT THE FUCK?

It starts off fine, with a gun fight and a chase in the desert, but soon enough the whole story gets transported to something that appears to be modern day Gotham City.  Not only that, Hex ends up in a throwdown with Batwing (whoever the fuck that is) and thrown in Arkham Asylum.  All-Star Western remains firmly entrenched in the Batman family of comics, but now not only does it not take place in the West, it doesn’t even take place in the 19^th century.

You want Jonah Hex to time travel?  Fine, do that.  It worked great in the 16 issue run of Hex, where Jonah briefly went to a Mad Max future and became a badass biker.  But no one had the balls to call that comic a Western.  Fuck, DC, what are you doing?

My preferred style of time traveler Jonah Hex.

One good note- cameo of the Mutants from Dark Knight Returns.  Those fuckers are always fun.

Lone Ranger Lost in the Wilderness

Somewhere along the line the Lone Ranger comic from Dynamite has gotten way off track.  The original 25 issue series by Brett Matthews was perhaps my favorite comic book of the last decade.  True to the source material yet totally modern in feel, it set a new standard for telling decompressed western comics. The series wrapped up and moved to a brief but fun Zorro / Lone Ranger crossover before restarting under the writing of Ande Parks.

I am not familiar with Parks, who seems to have spent most of his time in comics as an inker (contrary to popular belief, an important job that is not just tracing).  Writing, I have to say, may not be his strong suit.  The plots of the two story arcs so far are fair, but there is a real lack of connection to the original Lone Ranger material that keeps creeping in and annoying me.  For example, about five minutes of research on-line will turn up the writers’ bible for the original Lone Ranger radio program.  Among the points the producers held to was that, to maintain credibility in the story that the Lone Ranger’s identity remains a secret, he should never be captured and held long enough for someone to unmask him.  It is unrealistic that a villain would knock out a masked gunman and NOT take off his mask.  Yet there it is, in the first story line, the Lone Ranger captured, held in a cell, finally strung up on a gallows awaiting a dramatic rescue, with no one ever wondering just who is that masked man.  A seemingly minor point, but it makes the writing feel sloppy.

The second story arc in the series kicks off with Tonto getting shot and the Lone Ranger taking him back to his tribe to be healed.  Right, because western medicine is totally incapable, right?  Anyway, most of the story is then a long series of flashbacks to when evil white men killed Tonto’s family.  America is evil, white-eyes destroyed an idyllic paradise on earth, my country is forever tainted in blood, yes, yes, I’ve seen that before (but see my review of Copper for my thoughts on the alternative we pale faces were left with in Europe).  As the flashback continues we eventually see in issue #9 Tonto stalking, torturing, and killing the soldiers responsible.  Again, a quick look at the old Lone Ranger’s writers bible shows that the best plots don’t distinguish villains and heroes by race, and that the partnership of the Lone Ranger and Tonto sets an example that American of any creed or color can work together for the common good. 

I get the drive to make a darker and edgier comic- I did most of my comics reading in the 1990’s, when darker and edgier was all the rage.  But as the first Dynamite series shows (plus practically any Captain America comic in the last decade) you can still make a dark and edgy comic book with noble and heroic leads.  Let’s hope the editors at Dynamite figure that out soon.

Having said all that, Chuck Dixon’s concurrently published Lone Ranger: Snake of Iron series rocks.

UPDATE: That list of rules from the old radio program's writers' bible?  It's right on the Dynamite Comics web site.  Enjoy.

Quickshots- Peter Brandvold's Rogue Lawman

I was very surprised by the reading experience of Peter Brandvold’s Rogue Lawman.  From the cover description I was expecting a rollicking revenge story with brutal action scenes.  What I got was quite different.

Rogue Lawman opened up as revenge tales often do, with the horrible act that drives the hero to his task.  Gideon Hawk is a US Marshall, temporarily laid up with a broken wing and dealing cards on the side, enjoying some time with his loving wife and a son that, if he were born 100 years later, we would have called learning disabled.  Frankly, this was a pretty boring opening to what was advertised as a brutally action packed series.  However, when I look back on the book as a whole this may have been the best part.  The tender little family drama in the opening tugged a lot of heartstrings.  The Hawk family’s little imperfections, the troubles of the son, the parent’s acceptance, added a level of every day drama a la Steven King that got me emotionally involved in the story.

Then there were murders, chases, shootings, escapes, more shootings, blah, blah blah.  The action was a little repetitive, and the villain's regular escapes from our hero became predictable and perhaps a little boring.  When I think brutal western I think Cormac McCarthy; Brandvold doesn't hit that standard, but frankly who could?  Okay, James Carlos Blake does.  Also, any scene from the Jonah Hex comic that features Jonah's father.  Also, possibly the old Edge series, but I haven't gotten around to reading those.  

Peter Brandvold is mostly known for these kinds of action heavy books, and he is pretty good at it.  The writing of Brandvold's that I like, though, are the books with a human touch, with clever dialogue, with quirky characters.  He's written plenty of those books, so I'll leave the Rogue Lawman series of fans of rolling