re: Y'all gonna go see my Nicolas Cage Western THE OLD WAY??

quote:

---

I like the classics so I'm good with this. I kind of look at UNFORGIVEN as a bit innovative rather than classic. Not Tarantino by any means, but I think it kind of diverted from the "good guy/bad guy" vibes of the older films in some ways. The stuff like showing the pain of the shot cowboy, the way the kid realized that real life was not like his imagination, and even the torturing of Ned kind of set it apart from the earlier stuff.

Not sure which way the Cage film goes, but either way can make for quality movies.

---

UNFORGIVEN holds a special place in my heart! I have learned so much about filmmaking and screenwriting from watching it and reading David Webb Peoples' fantastic script. It's really one of the all-time greats.

In many ways, UNFORGIVEN is a line of demarcation between classic and more modern Westerns. The bad guys in Sturges and Ford films were kind of like English Bob - liars and cheats, sure. Gunslingers? Sure, they'd shoot a bit here and there. But they'd gotten stale with age. Those cinematic baddies were purely works of fiction, punched up by scribes like WW Beauchamp and immortalized in novels and movies. They had little connection to real history. A real villain like Little Bill easily dispatches English Bob. He knows the real truth of history - that it's brutal and messy. And it's the truly brutal men that make the rules of this world, one governed by force.

For the majority of the movie, Clint Eastwood isn't Clint Eastwood. He's not the guy we know as a legend of the Old West. He's a bum. A failed farmer. A mediocre father (who leaves his kids all alone?!). His wife is dead, and who knows what happened there, but it's safe to say he wasn't really cut out to be a husband for the rest of his life either. He's not even a particularly good friend to Ned.

Until Ned's dead. Then, the has-been we've watched stumble around the whole movie stops pretending he's a good man. He starts to drink again. And goes back to that saloon to become the man he's truly been the whole time: William Munny. A cold-blooded killer. A bad man. A truly brutal killer who levels every comer - all in front of a writer, WW Beauchamp, who writes down for the first time the true way the west was won.

The level of brutality - which carries with it a level of honesty about the Old West - I think ushered in a new bar for Westerns, including neo Westerns, that can be traced to movies like HELL OR HIGH WATER or even to more heightened actioners like JOHN WICK.