Westerns

The most recent genre of movies I took advantage of was westerns. I watched a bunch of the samauri films on the list below, and most of these, the ones I saw are in italics.



Top Rated "Western" Titles
Rank Rating Title Votes
1. 8.9 Buono, il brutto, il cattivo, Il (1966) 74,653
2. 8.7 C'era una volta il West (1968) 38,266
3. 8.5 The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) 18,699
4. 8.4 The Wind (1928) 1,173
5. 8.3 The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) 4,305
6. 8.3 High Noon (1952) 20,689
7. 8.2 Per qualche dollaro in più (1965) 21,043
8. 8.2 Unforgiven (1992) 54,618
9. 8.1 The Wild Bunch (1969) 18,514
10. 8.1 3:10 to Yuma (2007) 12,579
11. 8.1 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) 34,297
12. 8.0 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) 13,364
13. 8.0 The Searchers (1956) 17,814
14. 7.9 Per un pugno di dollari (1964) 19,918
15. 7.9 My Darling Clementine (1946) 4,437
16. 7.9 Rio Bravo (1959) 11,776
17. 7.9 Grande silenzio, Il (1968) 1,828
18. 7.9 Hud (1963) 4,315
19. 7.9 Red River (1948) 6,652
20. 7.9 Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) 4,149
21. 7.8 Stagecoach (1939) 8,868
22. 7.8 The Magnificent Seven (1960) 16,933
23. 7.8 Dances with Wolves (1990) 45,959
24. 7.8 Way Out West (1937) 1,706
25. 7.7 Destry Rides Again (1939) 2,567
26. 7.7 Winchester '73 (1950) 3,053
27. 7.7 Little Big Man (1970) 9,508
28. 7.7 Blazing Saddles (1974) 28,802
29. 7.7 The Gunfighter (1950) 1,776
30. 7.7 The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) 12,877
31. 7.7 3:10 to Yuma (1957) 1,702
32. 7.7 Shane (1953) 8,847
33. 7.7 The Mark of Zorro (1940) 1,898
34. 7.7 The Big Country (1958) 3,124
35. 7.6 Lonely Are the Brave (1962) 1,255
36. 7.6 Giant (1956) 7,343
37. 7.6 Giù la testa (1971) 4,419
38. 7.6 Fort Apache (1948) 3,382
39. 7.6 The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005) 9,469
40. 7.6 The Shootist (1976) 5,419
41. 7.6 Dead Man (1995) 18,937
42. 7.6 Viva Zapata! (1952) 1,555
43. 7.6 El Dorado (1966) 4,321
44. 7.5 Ride the High Country (1962) 2,870
45. 7.5 Tombstone (1993) 28,006
46. 7.5 Lone Star (1996) 11,132
47. 7.5 McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) 4,260
48. 7.5 High Plains Drifter (1973) 8,193
49. 7.5 Open Range (2003) 16,516
50. 7.5 The Proposition (2005) 9,405

Obviously, I've been doing mostly John Ford movies, with the occasional Spagetti western thrown in. NOTE: The movies in italian are spagetti westerns - the first being "the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," and the second being my all-time favorite, "Once Upon a Time in the West."

"My mother was a whore from Alamedia and the finest woman who ever lived. Whether for an hour or a month, my father must've been a happy man."


http://www.imdb.com/chart/western

New Posts, Bad Analogies

A blog post is like an orgasm ... it's generally too long between them, and when too many come at once, you're overwhelmed and need a break, but when you get one and it's been awhile, it's really, really good, because you forgot how good they really are.

Huh? I gotta stop reading Phillip Roth and trying to use metaphors, I'm obviously no good at them, like a creative-writing teacher with too much vocabulary and metaphor rolling around in that empty head of theirs.

Again? Damn.

Reading: The Twenty-Seventh City
Finished: Huey P. Long
Listening To: The People Under the Stairs
Playing: Halo 3
Watching: Rio Grande
Quoting: Neil Gaiman. "Perfection is a horrible lover to have, because once you've had her, just ok or adequate or better than average is never good enough again."



Just wrapping up the book, and I dunno, I love it. I read the reviews - a lot say it's great because it's a rookie attempt, that it doesn't focus enough on the characters individually, but I love it because it's not about the characters - even though people need characters in order to function, or to listen to someone for 500+ pages - but it's about cities in the midwest, about gentrification and urban renewal and how fake it all is/was, about downtown Denver and the Detroit casinos and it does a wonderful job making the city a vital character.

The plot is a bit far-fetched and again, underdeveloped. But it's not really about the plot. It's about the city. And while it left me feeling unsatisfied, and a little worried about his other book, the one that didn't get good reviews, and which I've put on my list next, it was a great break after the 900+ pages of Huey P. Long. Biographies are tough, because they're real - I mean, it's not made up - and the people's lives are so damn interesting - great men always are - but there's just so much DETAIL, so much MINUTAE ... so many names and places and not enough concept. One reason I liked Rising Tide so much (apart from how engineering-heavy it was) was it brought everything together without making some sort of moral judgement, but it was written with a bit of flair and as an event, but without overdoing it (like Dyson's "Come Hell or High Water ... only so much hyperbole and plays-on-word for me.).

So I give it an A - in my book. Having read The Corrections first, it's hard to not find fault in any other work by Franzen, because you know he's capable of such an amazing book. It's like ... watching a Jordan come back after retirement. He would still score 12 points a game in the NBA, but it wasn't nearly the same, it was almost sad, after knowing what he once was capable of (only reverse that cronology ... because Franzen has obviously become more capable the older he's gotten ... and having 19 years to write The Corrections didn't hurt).

I also get the sense that the only parts of the Twenty-Seventh City that are really even slightly autobiographical are the parts about the high school and college students. Franzen was 26(?) when he wrote it, and he wouldn't really (emphasize REALLY - he does a pretty amazing job) know what was going on in these older people's heads.

That's why the Corrections was so great - you knew that, like Phillip Roth, he was revealing himself, in all his horrible flawed reality.

A-