This movie’s gettin a squeeze of the ol’ limelight again on account of the Minnesota Coens are doing another version of the same book.
In this first version John Wayne plays U.S. Marshall Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn, who everybody talks about as a mean old bastard but let’s be honest, he’s really a lovably eccentric curmudgeon. I mean even if he says no at first it doesn’t take a whole lot to convince him to go on a bounty hunt with a 15 year old rich girl. And then he doesn’t rob her or slap her around or anything. In fact the big turning point in the story is when the Texas Ranger who’s going along tries to spank the girl with a switch, Rooster decides to put his foot down and enforce an anti-spanking policy.
I see plenty of room for Coen humor here with Mattie Ross, the spanking victim in question who hires Rooster to catch her father’s killer. She has a Barton Fink sense of entitlement (“My family owns property and I want to know why I’m being treated this way!”) and her repitition of the word “grit” (“I’m looking for someone with grit,” “I hear he has grit?” “Is this what you in Fort Smith call grit? Back in Yell County we have a different word for it,” etc.) would be right at home in any Coens movie. (read the rest of this shit…)
My friends,
Long before Kathryn Bigelow swept the country into a state of frenzied Hurt Lockermania there were other women directors paving their own roads, carving out their own niches, laying their own tracks, mapping out their own nature trails, and other metaphors. One such director was Shirley Clarke.
The Oscars this year performed a courageous service: they taught the world who Kathryn Bigelow was. Or at least that she’s a woman, she won the Oscar, she directed THE HURT LOCKER, and that business about her ex-husband, whatsisdick. So now she’s pretty close to a household name, she’s not just that legendary female director of action movies who for a short time had the filmatic chops to match or better her testacled counterparts. Now she’s reborn with a great movie at the top of her IMDB profile and a place in history.
As much as I like Marko Zaror, I thought DEFENDOR was a much better take on the “regular person becomes super hero” genre than MIRAGEMAN. To be fair, Woody Harrelson is not as good of a martial artist as Zaror, and is not as Chilean either. But he is good in this movie.
I was thinking the other day: I wonder if super hero movies are the westerns of our time? A genre that’ll dominate for a while and then after a generation or two of being done to death it’s put off into storage, except for special occasions, like the fancy silverware. If so then I think we’re a little early with all these super hero deconstructions, these different versions of “what would really happen if somebody tried to be a super hero?” WATCHMEN and the upcoming KICKASS are the expensive, fantastical versions of that kind of idea and then there’s this slew of low budget indie ones like SPECIAL, DEFENDOR and MIRAGEMAN.
It might be hard for some of you youths to believe, but there was a time when our boy Bruce
There seems to be alot of trailers and announcements and shit related to the sorts of pictures we’re interested in around here, so I figured I’d round them up so we can discuss them. Also, it is always exciting to have a picture of a bunch of cars exploding.
My new review collection 
Variety is reporting that, I don’t know, something about Twilight. James Cameron is gonna direct Twilight or whatever.
