The Sam Peckinpah western The Wild Bunch is so manly and violent it could turn Justin Trudeau into a man.
We going to talk about The Power of the Dog?
My grandad loved westerns, he would always watch them.
I sometimes watch some in his honour.
love love love once upon a time in the west.
suggest me some classics or some modern great ones.
Hmmmm....that's hard to say. Its an interesting character(s) study for sure. I wouldn't say it scratches the itch of a "western" in the way we are using the term in this thread. It flows into your second point...because the stories are somewhat simple...you can focus on characters and symbolism way more than some "conspiracy" driven "plot twists" and stuff like that.Haven't seen it yet. You recommend it? I've heard a pretty wide range of opinions on it.
I think Unforgiven has been brought up the most by different members in this thread. That's certainly a highly regarded classic. Hell or Highwater is one of my personal favorites that's relatively new.
I think I understand why I like the genre more today. I binged Reacher last week and there was a scene where Reacher looks at a bag of kitty litter and studies it. At that point, I realized I couldn't care less about all the intricacies and layers to the complex conspiracy.
Westerns are almost all like "There's 4 bad dudes coming to Town. Will you help me stop em?" The plots are so simple that the storytellers get to focus on character that much more.
Sounds interesting. Post-modern westerns can get real preachy though, I hope Costner remembers to make the films engaging and perhaps a bit fun. Going by DwW and Open Range he tends towards the maudlin but maybe we'll get something more like Silverado instead.Kevin Costerns Horizon project is looking like a 4 film epic...
https://variety.com/2022/film/news/kevin-costner-horizon-directing-four-movies-1235299756/
- 4 films.
- releasing every 3 months.
- over 170 speaking roles.
- spans 15 years.
- filming starts in August.
I'm a Make a Wish kid aren't I?
It would help if you gave us a date range, where/how you watched it, and any details like if the soldier lived, was he the main villain, etc. If you have some more info you should post it at stackexchange, there is a section there for finding stuff just like this.If anyone can tell me, I've been looking for a western all my life. I just remember the end from when I was very young. My mother was watching. A soldier (I think) followed some guy into a barn or building and the had a gunfight. The soldier ended up being burned. It was pretty gruesome for me as a child but I've always wanted to watch the whole movie.
Anyone know? Would be great if you did.
Holy **** this looks good.
Mini Western renaissance?!
The Dead Don't Hurt. Written and directed by Viggo Mortensen. Music composed by Viggo Mortensen. Releases on May 31st.
Anyone watching that Taylor Sheridan black Marshall show? It's on my list but since its probably a weekly drop I'm gonna let a few stack up.
I know Hollywood doesn't really show it but there were a lot of real life black cowboys. In fact, that's where the name came from. Black men were cow handlers and were called "boy" by the ranch owners... Eventually that evolved into "cow boys"
I was skeptical of this claim, so I googled the origin and here's what I found...
"Cowboy" was first used in print by Jonathan Swift in 1725, and was used in the British Isles from 1820 to 1850 to describe young boys who tended the family or community of cows.
Etymologists trace the use of the term cowboy back to 1000 AD in Ireland. Swift used it in 1705, logically enough, to describe a boy who tends cows. Modern usage, first in hyphenated form, dates from the 1830s in Texas. Colonel John S. "Rip" Ford used the word cow-boy to describe the Texan border raider who drove off Mexican cattle during the 1830s. The term carried a tinge of wildness, of life at the fringes of law and "civilization."
The name cowboy for the mounted herdman of cattle is almost a direct translation of the Spanish word vaquero from vaca meaning cow.
There does seem to be a number of ideologically driven sources post 2020 that attempt to redefine the word in racial terms.
I think the article raises some good points about there being freed blacks in the west, but 25% seems waaaaaaay too high. You can scroll through dozens and dozens of pictures of groups of ranch hands and cowboys, and while the coloring of the film and the resolution can be dodgy, virtually all look to be white. Maybe thats some sort of selection bias about who was allowed to be in a photo or who kept them for 100+ years, but I'd think that if 25% of cowboys were black you'd see a LOT more photos of them and they would feature in stories more prominently (though granted, a ton of these stories were written back east with little direct experience.I think two or more things can be true at the same time. Maybe the definition I gave is more colloquial than definitive. However, it's believed that buckaroo comes from Vaquero because of a mispronouncing of the Spanish word.
However, I suggest giving this article a read:
I think the article raises some good points about there being freed blacks in the west, but 25% seems waaaaaaay too high. You can scroll through dozens and dozens of pictures of groups of ranch hands and cowboys, and while the coloring of the film and the resolution can be dodgy, virtually all look to be white. Maybe thats some sort of selection bias about who was allowed to be in a photo or who kept them for 100+ years, but I'd think that if 25% of cowboys were black you'd see a LOT more photos of them and they would feature in stories more prominently (though granted, a ton of these stories were written back east with little direct experience.
But anyway, here was a flick I dug a lot
whatever happened to Mario van Peeples? He was never the greatest actor but damn he had the looks and the swagger.
And I still link him to Nina van Peeples though I don't think they are in any way related
I think two or more things can be true at the same time. Maybe the definition I gave is more colloquial than definitive. However, it's believed that buckaroo comes from Vaquero because of a mispronouncing of the Spanish word.
However, I suggest giving this article a read:
Have you read the article? It doesn't support the claim that 25% of cowboys were black.
The assumption seems to be based on the following quote...
"By 1825, slaves accounted for nearly 25 percent of the Texas settler population. By 1860, fifteen years after it became part of the Union, that number had risen to over 30 percent—that year’s census reported 182,566 slaves living in Texas."
It requires a lot of mental gymnastics to go from that quote to "One in 4 cowboys was black."
In the end, I'm going to go with the idea that the word cowboy is indeed NOT a racial epithet. Hell yes!
Have you seen Shane?I'm actually getting ready to go on a Western binge with some books. I'm going to read some Louis L'Amour novels, The Lonesome series and maybe Blood Meridian if I really feel like challenging myself.
Best modern Western to ME is 1:10 to Yuma.
This discussion got me to crack out my Time Life "The Old West" series book The Cowboys. Right on page 2 of the text they say 1 in every 6 or 7 was mexican, similar number was black, for a combined 1 in 3 but a more reasonable individual 15ish% black which seems to map to the pretty long term percentage of black versus "other" in America. And that book was published in 1973, so not only was it within living memory of folks where could have seen this stuff first hand, it was well before any "wokeness". Plus there were plenty of english and europeans that wrote about their experiences who presumably would not have had the degree of "erasing blackness" an American might.
Anyway, regardless of the exact percentage, I've no issue with multi-ethnic westerns because dammit its a WESTERN!
Now I wanna play Red Dead Redemption again.....