Word: mangold
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Lily, for one, is glad that it's the therapy she did try. One of her favorite films used to be James Mangold's 1999 adaptation of Girl, Interrupted, in which Winona Ryder plays a real-life borderline author. When Ryder's character learns she has received a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, she indignantly asks, "Borderline between what and what?" It's a question that weighed on Lily for years and one that many of us may start asking if borderline diagnoses continue to increase. But today Lily is able to laugh about the film because she knows, finally...
...There's an assumption in Hollywood that the western is a homeless genre," says Mangold, "that it doesn't have a built-in audience. The adults who might want to go don't go to the movies, and the young ones are locked into the superhero world." Mangold also sees "a Hollywood bias against the America between New York and L.A. The movie industry is basically built serving 14-year-old males, and they aren't interested in rural America...
Perhaps this is in part because when Americans try their hand at the genre, they hit obstacles the old western directors never had to consider. "John Ford could just run amuck," says Mangold, "carving out trails between sacred burial grounds and monuments. Now the environment is so protected in these national parks that we had 350 rangers watching every move if we step on one indigenous plant." Hollywood has also lost its teeming cavalry of saddle-up stars and stuntmen. Peter Fonda, who directed the fine western The Hired Hand in the 1970s and appears in the new Yuma, recalls...
...unfashionable aspects of the genre that attract directors to it. "There's something wonderfully analog about the western," says Mangold. "What's happening onscreen is happening. It's not a guy hanging in front of a green screen." Dede Gardner, who produced Jesse James through Pitt's company, Plan B, sees the western as therapeutically anachronistic and human-friendly: "We're besieged by technology, iPhone this and robot that. We're figuring out how to exist without even talking to one another. Well, you can't do that in [westerns]. It's all about person-to-person confrontation...
...Dominik and Mangold, and the Coens and Miike, believe the form still has life in it. Their movies show it does. Working in a genre many think obsolete makes the filmmakers as alert and precise as the outlaws they depict. The pictures can't coast on the clichés audiences love, so they need a rigor and daring a buddy comedy or action movie doesn't. The demand on the director is different too: not to make a blockbuster, just a strong, true film. Maybe these movies will grant the genre a stay of execution and ensure that the western...