Jimmy83455

The 70s produced a lot of great paranoid thrillers - Coppola's The Conversation, Pakula's The Parallax View and All The President's Men and Schlesinger's Marathon Man among them - but Sydney Pollack's jittery character piece, starring Robert Redford as a CIA analyst trying to evade the assassin (Max Von Sydow) who's already wiped out his entire team - sits atop the list because it narrows its focus entirely to the cat-and-mouse chase at its core, boiling its post-Watergate theme of governmental indifference to human life down to the relationship between two professionals who work for different departments, and the woman (Faye Dunaway) caught in the crossfire. It's also a Christmas movie, so that's nice.

The story itself doesn't matter much. We go to a classic John Wayne Western not to see anything new, but to see the old done again, done well, so that we can sink into the genre and feel confident we won't be betrayed. To some degree Wayne movies are rituals, and so it is fitting that they resemble each other. "El Dorado" was a remake of Hawks' "Rio Bravo" (1958), and "Rio Lobo" draws from both of them. (It is said that when Hawks called Wayne and offered to send over the script, Wayne replied, "Why bother? I've already made the movie twice.")

Can't put my finger on it but something is wrong about the host. May not be his fault I think he just doesn't mesh with the subject matter. He does not pay attention to what he is doing, feels like he is just reading a script that someone else wrote and that it is all over his head. I will have to watch him in something else to decide if it is him or the production as a whole.