Word: baling
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...they're often as remote from our shores as the Italians. The stars of the new 3:10 to Yuma are the Australian Russell Crow and the Brit Christian Bale. The writer-director of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is the New Zealand-born Andrew Dominick. Today, as in the 60s, the Western holds more fascination for outsiders than for Americans. But if the genre is to rise from the dead one more time, the grandsons of the pioneers - the descendants of those millions of viewers who made the Western a unique contribution to popular...
...Country for Old Men, coming in November. Or when a director with a hit movie on his résumé charms financiers outside the studio. That's how James Mangold, fresh from Walk the Line, got to remake the 1957 western 3:10 to Yuma, with Russell Crowe and Christian Bale...
That's the appeal of 3:10 to Yuma, which opened Sept. 7 and was the box-office champ of its first weekend. Like the 1957 film, it's about Dan Evans (Bale), a family man on a failing farm who lost a leg in the Civil War. He sees a payday, and a chance for redemption in his son's eyes, by escorting the killer Ben Wade (Crowe) to justice. Screenwriters Michael Brandt and Derek Haas have opened up the action to include a trek in which Wade outsmarts or just kills most of his captors; and there...
...movie can be seen as political, and Yuma has subterranean references to the Iraq occupation. As Fonda notes, "Christian Bale's character comes home from the war, inflicted with a disability beyond the loss of a limb, a deep psychological wound. It's safe to say the audience isn't watching this movie, with its mindless gunplay and out-of-control gangs, and going, 'Holy cow, that's Baghdad!' But those themes are there. A western can talk about today in the past tense...
...current length, or half. At 135 mins. (about the same as Across the Universe), the film almost dares a viewer to choose favorite parts, and others for pruning. The section in which Gere as an older Bob hunts for his lost dog baffled and bored me; the Franklin and Bale parts I found quite moving; Blanchett is worth watching through her character's triumphs, disasters and longueurs. Overall, I'm glad I was there...