Word: film
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Halfway through the film, evil rancher Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons) eludes the practiced clutches of lawman Virgil Cole (Ed Harris). "I told you you'd never hang me," Bragg boasts, and Virgil replies, more quietly, "Never ain't here...
...western like Appaloosa, never takes a while to come. The best thing about the picture, which Harris also directed and co-wrote, is its respect for the strengths of a film form that dominated Hollywood 50 years ago but today is made only when a pedigreed actor like Harris (or Kevin Costner or Tommy Lee Jones) insists...
...Appaloosa isn't a revisionist western, like the Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone films of the 1960s and '70s, which revitalized the genre and pretty much wore it out; this one is ordinary and borderline ornery. It lacks the verve of 3:10 to Yuma, the sullen sweep of Brad Pitt's Jesse James epic, the deranged energy of Sukiyaki Western Django, to name just three oaters from last year. But in its fidelity to western verities, Appaloosa may seem radical to today's viewers. At a time when images in all visual media bombard the brain, the western...
...Proud as Virgil and Everett are of their trigger speed, they're just as infatuated with fancy speech. At the start of the film, a narrator says, "Life has a way of making the foreseeable that which never happens, and the unforeseeable that which your life becomes." The "that which" clues the viewer to the ornate language the cowboys will try wrapping their tongues and minds around. It's as if they'd just read two novels - one by Ned Buntline, the other by Henry James - and are determined to arrange a shotgun marriage of the pair...
...Tennessee native's voice when he became a popular DJ for the Texas radio station KMAC. His years as a broadcaster earned him induction into the Country Music DJ and Radio Hall of Fame in 1981. Four years later, he portrayed a country singer in Sweet Dreams, a film about the life of legendary crooner Patsy Cline. Walker died of colon cancer...