Western

Steel Dawn

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Steel Dawn
  • IMDb: link

Set in a post-apocalyptic future where water is the most precious resource, 1987’s Steel Dawn stars Patrick Swayze as a former soldier turned nameless traveler, credited only as “Nomad,” whose search for the killer (Christopher Neame) of his mentor (John Fujioka) leads him to a farm run by a widow (Lisa Niemi) under attack by a ruthless nearby landowner (Anthony Zerbe).

Steel Dawn offers your basic western plot (borrowing more than a little from Shane, complete with a young boy taking a shine to our hero) with a modest amount of sci-fi trappings featuring weird mutants in the desert wasteland and struggle over scant resources. Re-released on Blu-ray, the film is at most a curiosity for Swayze fans and holds little other actual value other than the extended fight between our hero and the assassin.

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Bacurau

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  • Title: Bacurau
  • IMDb: link

Bacurau Blu-ray reviewSet in the near future, the small Brazilian village of Bacurau suddenly disappears from maps, satellites, and cell towers not long after the death of the community’s matriarch and the return of another member of their community (Bárbara Colen). Far off the beaten path, no one outside the village seems to notice.

While already dealing with a water crisis caused by a crooked politician (Thardelly Lima), tensions begin to rise. As the community slowly becomes aware something is wrong, there is also an odd appearance by a UFO and attacks on both a water truck and at a nearby farm.

Without giving too much away, Bacurau centers around two groups – those in the village and a second group who is slowly revealed to be the cause of Bacurau’s recent problems. While the town looks to local heroes (Thomas Aquino and Silvero Pereira) to protect them, we learn about what the other group led by Udo Kier is after, ultimately leading to a climactic conflict in the village.

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News of the World

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: News of the World
  • IMDb: link

News of the World movie reviewThe idea of a man travelling from town to town to read newspapers may seem quaint in today’s information age, but the collaboration between Paul Greengrass and Tom Hanks offers a classic low-key western that is the dramatic equal to their previous collaboration, Captain Phillips. It may not be The Searchers, but Greengrass offers a wide-open canvas for Hanks to provide one of his better performances in recent years.

Traveling from town to town, reading his collection of recent newspapers, Captain Kidd (Hanks) comes across a lynched soldier and a young girl (Helena Zengel) who, as one character succulently put it, has been orphaned twice. Raised by the Kiowa people who killed her family, only to see the tribe wiped out by Union soldiers, Johanna’s only living relatives live far south towards the home Captain Kidd has avoided since the end of the Civil War.

The set-up is fairly simple, the reluctant Kidd decides to deliver the wild girl no one else seems to be able to control, home. On the road, the pair encounter various obstacles while learning a bit about each other, themselves, and where they belong.

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True History of the Kelly Gang

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  • Title: True History of the Kelly Gang
  • IMDb: link

True History of the Kelly Gang Blu-ray reviewTrue History of the Kelly Gang takes liberties with the history of Australian outlaw and folk hero Ned Kelly (George MacKay) for “entertainment” purposes. I put “entertainment” in quotes because True History of the Kelly Gang is anything but entertaining. The film is a slog through Kelly’s cheerless childhood to learning the outlaw ways and eventually running his own gang (while skirting issues of his sexuality and motivations at every turn). I’m not saying you couldn’t find a way to make an entertaining movie about a crossdressing cowboy, but this certainly isn’t it.

Adapted from the novel of the same name, the script adapted by Shaun Grant spends quite a bit of time on Kelly’s relationship to his parents (Essie Davis and Ben Corbett) and offering an explanation for where his later violence was born, but it doesn’t have much to say about Kelly as either an outlaw or a man. The tone shifts wildly from dark and brooding to at times nearly whimsical leading to an uneven experience that leaves me disinterested in learning anything more about Ned Kelly (or ever seeing this film again).

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Guilty Pleasure – American Outlaws

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  • Title: American Outlaws
  • IMDb: link

American Outlaws Blu-ray reviewBy any objective standard, you can’t call 2001’s American Outlaws a good movie. The western is historically inaccurate in countess ways, features over-the-top performances from a number of actors, feels far too modern in tone and style, is punctuated with juvenile humor, and ignores almost any context for its characters’ actions and place in history. What you can say about American Outlaws is it’s dumb fun in the style of Young Guns (which obviously inspired it). Heavy on dumb, yes, but still fun.

Opening at the end of the Civil War, which involves some heroic foolishness by our leading man almost single-handedly winning the group’s final battle, the film stars Colin Farrell as Jesse James, Gabriel Macht as his brother Frank, and Scott Caan and Will McCormack as Cole and Bob Younger. The weary soldiers return home from war only to find railroad baron Thaddeus Rains (Harris Yulin) pushing families off their farms in the name of progress through bribes, theft, arson, threats, and murder.

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