Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Dollar for the Dead!

Theme: Wild West - Lissie

Exhibit Z in the increasingly slam-dunk case that just doing the clichés properly is always better than trying to be clever, 1999's forgotten Dollar for the Dead just takes the spaghetti western formula and delivers like Santa on meth. Emilio Estevez (The Breakfast Club) plays "Cowboy", which is scarcely any better than "Stranger" from Any Gun Can Play, but what are you gonna do?

Sometimes I try sitting like this all mysterious not talking to anyone. No one's picked a fight with me yet, I'm sure because they're too afraid.

Cowboy teams up with Dooley (William Forsythe), a Confederate veteran with one piece of a puzzle that will lead them to a stash of gold. Dooley is affable, Cowboy terse. Along the way they fight redlegs led by Mike from Breaking Bad, a hulking menace with a mysteeerious beef with Cowboy, and a Mexican general or colonel or something, IDK. The action is of the coolmaxxed variety: Cowboy does things like drop a shot glass, gun down his enemy, and catch it before it hits the floor - the sort of thing they try to have characters do in Disney Starwars but actually cool instead of ear gages and vape shops """"""""""""""""cool"""""""""""""""".

The entire genre of parody is cope for noone being this cool IRL.

Another gag you may recognise has him spin round in a circle shooting bullets through the floor until a whole circle of floor falls out from under him, delivering him handily from the antagonists rushing after him. Kate Beckinsale later copied this move in her mallcore goth flick Underworld.

"Weee" - Cowboy.

I don't actually know if it originated here or whether Dollar also ripped it off from somewhere, but if I were to come up with something that expressed the intersection of cartoon logic and cool, it would most likely be something like that (maybe dumber). It would be kind of funny if it turned out he shot dozens of random civilians through the floorboards, but you know he didn't because the world warps to accommodate you when you're a cool gunslinger instead of a real-life fuckup.

Note that Dollar shares the old Castellari motif of sticking the camera between, atop or underneath things ADHDly, for extra authenticity.

There's a lot of fun dialogue in the movie, too, which is nice because noone writes good dialogue anymore. I tried to think of a good line from a movie made this decade, and I couldn't, even though I tried as hard as I could possibly be bothered to. This wasn't very hard, and that's my point: they're just not good enough to try.  Watch Dollar for the Dead, practice quick-drawing finger-guns in front of your mirror, wear a cowboy hat, have autism, and, as ever, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: 3:10 to Yuma!

Theme: it has its own!

Not to be confused with its much noisier and less suspenseful remake, the original 3:10 to Yuma is the western Alfred Hitchcock might have made, had he ever made a western instead of eating pork pies. IDK why suspense is a lost art; it's not like the technology has been lost or superceded, but noone does suspense anymore and that sucks. Much more of the OG 3:10 is spent waiting, to far greater effect than all the sound and fury of the remake, which adds pointless detours, setpieces and characters, and every memorable line of which is ripped straight from the classic.

Composition is a lost art too.

Van Heflin, who is not an hard rock band, plays Dan Evans, the everyman tested with the onerous duty of herding legendary outlaw Ben Wade (Glenn Ford) to the station in the line of fire of Wade's gang buddies. Heflin plays nervous better than any actor I can name, eye twitching and grim face sweating as the pressure mounts, while Ford's cool-guy baddy counterpoints him with the detached calm of a seasoned psychopath. Evans has reason to be nervous: his land suffers from drought and his wife passive-aggressively implies he should have picked a fight with Wade's gang and been easily and instantly killed like a real man.

You almost never get fatally shot anymore, it's like you don't even love me.

In stark contrast to this troubled marriage, Wade forms a fleeting attachment to Felicia Farr's world-weary saloon thot with effortless charm, only later to muse that the grass might be greener on Evans' side. It would be easy for Wade to lapse into nothin-personnelisms like all the shitty, non-Manhunter versions of Hannibal Lecter, but neckbeardry is nimbly swerved by the deft, calculating performance and palpable charisma of the character. It's a simple but highly credible battle of wits and nerves between two men who cultivate a healthy mutual respect based in wariness, making for a character study as satisfying as the finely honed suspense.

Body Language EXPERTS react to 3:10 to Yuma! The guy on the bed is the calm one. Thanks for the 500k views! Don't forget to hit the bell!

But something else that elevates it over the remake is the heightened, mythic quality conveyed in its dramatic theme song and more subtly in the hints of providence that start to show through in the final break for the station. The train itself comes on like a portent of judgement, venting clouds of steam, and the crane operator gets a workout sending the omniscient camera wheeling and descending over the action like a rich kid on Christmas might abuse his brand new drone. Malign 60s revisionism, spaghetti hipster nihilism and miseryslop from Unforgiven to Deadwood have all coagulated into one big push to demythologise and demystify the Old West, just as Game of Thrones attempted to beshit the magic and lustre of Tolkien and friends, but all such smarmy drivel pales in the face of something far more vital and profound. The great stories continue to ennoble with stolid persistence through the years, so skip the remake and the dEcOnStRuCtIoNs, and take that traaaaiiiin.

Imagine thinking you can demythologize a place that looks like this.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Any Gun Can Play!

Theme: Desperado - Alice Cooper

Spoilers all the way.

Ever see a western actually do the tumbleweed from cartoons? You have now.

Any Gun Can Play has my new favourite movie opening: three strangers ride into town. One is clearly meant to look like Clint Eastwood's Dollars character, another like Lee Van Cleef's (the third doesn't look anything like Eli Wallach but what are you gonna do?). They're hyped up with a succession of low angles and dramatic zooms into the frightened faces of townsfolk observing from their windows. This goes on for a few minutes.

The undertakers in these flicks must live like kings.

Then they're suddenly killed by our surprise protagonist (George Hilton), who will be known henceforth as Stranger, which he tells us people call him, for he is too autistic to realise it's not a cool nickname; they just don't know who the fuck he is. Anyway, Stranger merking Sergio Leone's protags in effigy is the most hilariously spiteful way to ring in a movie since For Your Eyes Only, and is such a characteristically Mediterranean display of audacity that it makes me grin like a deranged retard (more).

"Psshh...nothin personnel...kid..." - actual dialogue.

What makes this act of celluloid effrontery funnier still is that Gun rips off the Good the Bad and the Ugly formula so blatantly, like Enzo G. Castellari (of whom, needless to say, you have not heard) was telling Leone, "hey, nice template, kid, but seriously, this is how it's done". The fact the rest of Castellari's ouevre is Z-schlock like The New Barbarians makes this bravado more impudent still, which warms the single cockle of my walnut-sized heart. Never let it be said that Patrick H. Bastard does not root compulsively for the underdog.

He also made The Bronx Warriors, starring my mutuals racially diverse neonazis as its heroes. Based? Pozzed? Who even knows anymore?

Yet, while immediate followup One Dollar Too Many lapsed too hard into slapstick silliness, Gun maintains an excellent heightened tone, making surrealistic genre satire with a straight face, like Twin Peaks or the early Bondkinos. It transcends the obvious and breaches that dream-realm of normative cinéma where neckbeards never reach. Sure, Gun is a spaghetti western satire, but, like Scream, it still feels like a real movie, which today's bathos-peddlers can never achieve (yeah, I'm talking about you, Rian Johnson).

Real movies look like this.

Any Gun Can Play also stars Gilbert Roland as bandido Monetero, beside flagrantly Italian hottie Stefania Careddu, billed as Kareen O'Hara, as his Mexican moll (????).

"¿Faith and begorrah, gringo, where's me lucky charms? ¡Viva la raza! ¡Andale!" - Kareen O'Hara.

Together with Edd Byrnes' defector from finance, these form the amoral triad/quadrangle that will variously team up and backstab one another for a haul of cash, leaving about 250,000 incidental goons dead in their wake. Since everyone in this movie is just as bad as everyone else, you're refreshingly free to choose who, if anyone, to root for, but Stranger alone is graced with an opening title theme song in the vein of classic westerns like 3:10 to Yuma but, I suspect, more directly inspired by the grandiose themes from James Bond kinos like Thunderball.

It even plays over a train montage, compounding the tism allegations. One of us! One of us!

The only thing that makes this arguably not by far the GOAT spaghetti western is the unaccountable absence of Morricone music, but I won't dock it a star because you'll come away from it humming his Dollars scores anyway. Is that a fair way to rate movies? Who cares? Watch Any Gun Can Play, you stupid fucking asshole.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Pale Rider!

Article theme: Sinnerman - 16 Horsepower

Clint Eastwood might have put the western out of its misery with Unforgiven, but first he gave it a more dignified sendoff with 1985's Pale Rider, a distillation of the thematic and archetypal core of the genre that leans into and loves the mythic side of it that Unforgiven would less interestingly repudiate.

Because Eastwood rarely bothered much with lighting for his exteriors, his face is often in shadow as he rides around, making him even more like Death on his horse.

Pale Rider is largely a retread of Shane and borrows moments from that film so brazenly we say "go for it", out loud to our PC monitors (you don't still have a TV set, right?). It also nods to Once Upon a Time in the West (the one that got away for Eastwood, who was the first choice for Bronson's role), in these guys' uniform dusters:

>tfw no friends to walk around with dressed like this :(((

No doubt a bigger western NERD could point out other little homages, but Pale Rider is also somewhat of a spiritual sequel to Eastwood's own High Plains Drifter. With his characteristically gritty, naturalistic style of filming, Eastwood might seem an unlikely candidate to delve into /x/ territory, but it's evident that Drifter's flirtation with the supernatural stuck with him. Both films concern a mysterious stranger coming to dispense terrible justice in a town afflicted by greed, corruption and sin, who may or may not be a ghost. In Drifter, Eastwood's stranger befriended a dwarf and made him mayor of the town; in Rider, his Preacher faces off with a giant (Richard Kiel, The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker), evoking David Lunch's giant and dwarf casting in Twin Peaks in a subtle thematic pairing of the two films and a hint of kinship between the ghostly strangers and people verging on the look of fairytale beings.

This is the look I give manlets too. Not heightist, just don't like 'em.

With its red town and dream flashback sequences, High Plains Drifter is more overtly, garishly surreal, but it's the very subtlety of Pale Rider that makes it so unsettling and atmospheric, to say nothing of its brooding S-tier score. Moreover, Drifter caricatures its bad townsfolk, while Rider skewers a very real type of scumbag in its LaHood (Richard Dysart):

LaHood embodies the selfish boomercon businessman devoid of noblesse oblige, who sees his own people as kulaks in the way of line going up on chart. Preacher's righteous renunciation of his slimy materialism is invoked and catalysed by a young girl's prayer. LaHood's dark interiors contrast with the snow-white mountaintops whence Preacher rides. When his work is done, he rides back off into the white, perhaps until the next time, when the trumpets sound.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Punisher!

Article theme: just listen to the soundtrack, man.

When the Berenstein timeline forked off from our own, its Marvel chose to eschew le ironic quips and be 500% unironic chudkino, releasing nothing but sequels to 2004's The Punisher. This sole gem in the capeshit coalheap commits whole-assedly to its edgy remit. Thomas Jane's Frank Castle cracks scarcely an expression the whole runtime, pulling off the kind of cool of which we mortals only dream when we don our Columbine cosplays.

Me staring down the Asda security guard, knowing full well I turned down a receipt for my two dozen Cadbury's Creme Eggs at the till.

You know the story: Frank is an FBI agent in the movies where the FBI takes on dangerous mobsters instead of railroading old grannies who amble through the Capitol, so he incurs the wrath of mob boss John Travolta (Broken Arrow) and his wife Laura Harring (Mulholland Dr.), who orders Frank's whole family whacked as revenge for their late son. Frank alone survives to edgily take down the Travolta crime family in reverse-revenge or, as he puts it, punishment.

Much as I love you all, if this all-time Would Hall-of-Famer asked me to have your family whacked, I doubt I'd even feel bad about it.

Not content just to kill all the mobsters (though he does that too), Frank engineers an hilariously convoluted plot straight out of Orson Welles' blackface comedy Othello to convince Travolta that Harring is cucking him with his Village-Peoplely mustachioed consigliere, just to be a dick. I don't know if the scenes in which he goes as far as planting fire hydrants in front of her car to get her ticketed were meant to be Looney-Tunes-logic hysterical, but that's sure how they played to me. I wouldn't altogether write the humour off as inadvertent though; scenes featuring what I assume are bad guys from the comics (never read a damn one) lean more blatantly into cartoon mode:

Imagine being Thomas Jane and putting more work into acquiring the perfect ripped male body than I've put into everything in my life combined (no homo), then this fucking beast shows up on set.

An underrated moment has Frank contemplate the sorry state of his fridge contents as the big dude slams his head in it.

The finely-balanced humour aside, it's mostly quite a low-key, elegaic story of a man with nothing left to live for, who becomes a symbol of elusive justice; a ghost of sorts, like Eastwood's Preacher in Pale Rider. Bereaved and bereft, Frank sits alone in his room in the dark, drinking himself to death, no reason to get up tomorrow but to punish the guilty. The Morricone pastiche theme music is sadder, wearier, not gormlessly triumphant like the interchangeable themes of every latterday Marvel hero. The spaghetti western has become mythologised by those who've never seen one; in reality, most are sub-Mad Max ripoff in their quality and care, but The Punisher ekes out the poetry found in the best fistful of examples (OK, really it's all Morricone's contributions that redeem the genre, but we'll be nice).

Sorry babe, I'm stone cold incel. I don't even make eye contact with a woman (too autistic). See ya around...kid...

It's not hard to see why they never followed this up in our Berenstain timeline: the R rating put a hard cap on the potential for profit, half the prospective audience would have found the idea of a vigilante who actually kills people too heckin icky, and at some point you'd have had to break with the all-white cast of criminals for Frank to kill, which would have had the Death Wish moral-panickers squealing histrionically all over the web even back then. I give this one a pass from the safe-edgy stamp of shame only on the assumption that it's pretty much a comics-accurate origin story. Regardless, though, one well-judged, excellently-scored western-tinged chudcore classic easily outclasses every smarmy Em Cee Uuuniverse entry and offers just a hint of what might once have been, and what could be again in better times.

Sic semper soyjaks.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Ride Lonesome!

Some spoilers below.

"But Pat, in this movie they all ride together!" Filtered by the very title. For shame!

If John Wayne's finest moment was Tall in the Saddle (and pay no attention to consensus; it was), Randolph Scott's must be Ride Lonesome, one of a number of low-budget, character-driven pieces that brood over such concerns as trust and betrayal, guilt and redemption, and whether the past can be overcome or will persist in haunting us indefinitely. None of this sounds like much fun, but Ride Lonesome never lets its weighty themes overpower its merits as an entertainment spectacle.

Have you ever actually seen smoke signals used in a western before? You have now.

Scott plays the coolest-named western hero, BEN BRIGADE, a bounty hunter who, in the movie's opening, faces off with reckless young outlaw Billy, whom we will later learn has a still meaner big brother: the ubiquitous Lee Van Cleef. Brigade hopes to escort Billy to justice, staying one step ahead of Van Cleef, but his plans are complicated when he's forced to team up with outlaw Sam Boone (Pernell Roberts, whose name is "Pernell", in a standout role) at a waystation beset by local Mescaleros, who soon reveal their design to purchase the waystation's lone female occupant (Karen Steele) as a bride for the low, low price of her late husband's horse, in a cross-cultural faux pas reminiscent of the time the Aztec tlatoani married the princess at Coatepec only to receive the in-laws for a social call wearing her flayed skin after sacrificing her.

Was it autism?

When Steele reacts with horror at this revelation of her husband's death, the Mescaleros sense the deal is off, so our motley collection of antiheroes find themselves pursued by the Indians as well as Van Cleef's gang. To pile on still further, Brigade must keep a watchful eye on Boone and Billy, against the threat of treachery and an escape attempt respectively, while Boone and his sidekick keep their eyes fixed squarely on the pulchritudinous Steele.

Don't you think it's time we all just admitted busty blondes actually are the correct genre of women?

It's an elaborate Jenga tower of risk and tenuous alliances, threats from within and without, keeping the viewer guessing how the blocks are going to fall until the final minutes of the kino. As we get to know our cast of desperadoes better, our feelings toward them gnarl and complicate. Pernell plays Boone with a knife-edge balance of charm and threat. Scott, typically poker-faced, reveals a tightly dammed-up pain as secrets of his past and future plans are drip-fed to the viewer. By the time the fateful third act rolls around, no more cinematic portent could you ask for than the movies' most foreboding tree:

Watch Ride Lonesome today.