Word: grits
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...while these late-risers prepped themselves for the best that Harvard varsity sports has to offer, they missed out on a true display of grit and determination by a group of real weekend warriors: the participants of the intramurals Fall River...
Like the Boston-shot films Mystic River and The Departed, Gone Baby Gone harbors many ambivalent secrets. People do awful things out of weakness and from a selfishness they persuade themselves is protective love. Affleck lays it all out with clarity and grit, though the actor in him can't help giving every star a big verbal aria. That guy--actor Affleck--probably also wishes he could star in a movie as smart and twisty and morally complex as this...
...That's a mere coda, though, to the film's climactic half-hour, when Berg pours on the adrenaline with cool shootouts, last-minute rescues and the cornering of the evil genius. That should give The Kingdom mass-audience appeal as a retro-fantasy of American grit and smarts, culminating in politico-military triumph. Who needs a stalled, baffled, exhausted Army when our four globetrotting, gun-toting crime-solvers can be sent to the scene to sleuth out and wipe out the bad guys...
...influence in Europe and Asia, Django got no Stateside release that I know about. In fact, few spaghetti Westerns beyond the Leones were released here. Americans stuck with the Duke through True Grit and patronized the anti-Westerns of Sam Peckinpah (notably The Wild Bunch) and Robert Altman (McCabe & Mrs. Miller, another snowy oater). And then, bang, the genre was dead. The setting, the pace, the moral stakes all seemed so very 19th century. When the Western is periodically revived, it's not from popular demand but from the antique obsessions of powerful filmmakers...
...picked up the reputation as a thinking man's spy series. Certainly they were darker, grimier, than the old James Bond films and their glitzy clones. (The latest Bond, Casino Royale, took some cues from the Bournes: made the hero more brutal, gave the visual a hint of grit.) But the notion of an amnesiac agent, a spy with no past, born into a web of intrigue, search for his true identity, is not automatically Oedipus Rex. Bourne, who needs no sleep or food or pee breaks, no downtime at all, he's closer to the Terminator, a national-security...