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!)

Lou Prophet, Where Have You Gone?

Earlier this year I wrote a lukewarm review of Peter Brandvold’s The Devil’s Winchester, an entry in a long running series about bounty hunter Lou Prophet (which you can find much more about by clicking on the Peter Brandvold tag below).  I didn’t like the book so much because it lacked the fun and character development of the earlier Prophet books.  Brandvold wrote back and asked me to stick around for the next one, sure to be to my liking.  Heck, he even offered to eat the manuscript on youtube if I didn't like it.  I pre-ordered The Devil Laughter right away, sure I’d love it.

I don’t.  Brandvold is still a good writer, but the Lou Prophet that I enjoyed so much, and frankly got me into reading westerns in the first place, is pretty much gone.  The books are all grimdark now, with lots of violence, and not much levity.  That was the genius of the early books- tales of an emotionally scarred Civil War vet who makes a deal with the devil to accept his eventual place in Hell as long as he can party as hard as he can on Earth.  All the bounty hunting stuff use to be just about funding the whiskey and whores, and those debauched and funny chapters were a blast.  My favorite chapter of any Prophet book is the opening of The Devil Gets His Due, where Lou wrestles a drunken mountain man’s drunken pet bear to impress a buxom saloon girl.  I still pull that chapter out from time to time for laughs.  I can’t even imagine a scene like that in these books any more.

Actually I can, because I saw a couple of preview images from a dormant Lou Prophet comic book years ago.  And damn, son, they were funny.  Unfortunately, I can’t find them anywhere on-line any more.  If anyone has them, send a link!  As the Prophet books continue I really do think that they’d play better as comic books, as the characters are vividly described oddities of the west, almost like Arkham Asylum let loose in the 1880’s.  

 

The Lou Prophet books could use a little more of this...

Let me make one thing clear- Brandvold is a great writer.  If action packed, blood and guts books are your thing, you need look no further.  They’re just not my thing, at least not all the time. 

Quickshots- Peter Brandvold’s The Devil’s Winchester

There’s an irony that I write a quickshots on The Devil’s Winchester, since it has taken me over a year to read it.  I normally gobble up new books from Peter Brandvold’s Lou Prophet: Bounty Hunter series fast, as it is a quick, funny, and action packed set of novels. This one was barely interesting, and it was only memories of other, better books by Brandvold that kept me reading.   The Devil’s Winchester had none of the humor or character development we are used to seeing in the series.  Along about page 170 you see why, when Brandvold and editors slip up and call Lou Prophet by the name Longarm instead.  The Devil’s Winchester is at least partially lifted out of work intended for the Longarm series, and it shows that Brandvold is writing in a genericized housename style rather than in his own voice.  If my math is right this was the eighth book in the series, but the first disappointment.  Based on the past work I’ll definitely pick up the next book in the series, but I hope it really will be a Lou Prophet book, and not Longarm with a different name.

Django Unchained- Tarantino’s New Western

It looks like Quentin Tarantino, the master directors of racial tension and over the top violence, is wrapping up a new western, Django Unchained.  Filmed in Wyoming and New Orleans, it stars Jamie Foxx, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Sam Jackson.  Expect lots of use of the F-bomb and N-word between scalpings when it opens Christmas Day 2012.

Quickshots- Tom Horn

Too many westerns to write about, not enough time.  Here’s a new idea for me- quickshots.  Books and movies reviewed in 200 words or less.

Tom Horn is a 1980 western starring Steve McQueen as the title character, a cowboy turned stock detective and possible assassin in turn of the century Wyoming. The film started off enjoyably enough, with some nice western views and fun cowboy-meets-dude scenes.  The story never really took off for me, though.  Overall the movie was visually uninspiring outside of the landscapes, slowly plotted, indifferently acted, and just overall mediocre. 

The one place where it stood out is the imagery of the west.  The scenery and landscape camerawork are absolutely fantastic.  You get a sense that this could have been a better film if they ditched the plot and actors and just filmed 90 minutes of mountains and prairie with some nice music in the background.  The real Tom Horn was hung the day before his forty third birthday in 1903, but McQueen looks more like 70 in this film despite being under 50 when it was filmed, just before his death.  It was McQueen’s second to last film, and he looks worn out.  McQueen reportedly spent the last years of his life stuffed with booze, pot, coke, and experimental anti-cancer drugs.  Live clean, kids.