Bone Tomahawk!

I've been hearing about Bone Tomahawk for some time and long wanted to see it. I'd read that it was a pretty compelling yarn with some exceedingly grisly parts. All of that prove to be true.

In the tiny remote western town of Bright Hope, with much of the male population away on sundry cattle drives a dangerous threat emerges. Brought to the town by a murderous man who had escaped punishment for violating sacred ground brutal Native Americans who can properly be called "savages" invade and make off with the man and a woman (Lili Simmons) who was tending to some of his wounds. This demands that the sheriff (Kurt Russell) and his deputy (Richard Jenkins) go in search to rescue her. They are joined by her husband (Patrick Wilson) who is limited with a wounded leg and another mysterious man with a murderous reputation (Matthew Fox). These four ride into the wilds to find what one local dubbed "Troglodytes".

It appears that even the local Indians avoid and fear this cannibalistic tribe which lives far across rough territory in a high cave. Nonetheless the trek is undertaken and that's the story of the movie. What happens to these men in their quest to save one man's wife reveals character at almost every turn and in a nod to classic Westerns, the character revealed is that of men who are equal to the task despite the task being nearly hopeless.

The movie I was most reminded of while watching Bone Tomahawk was not another western but a historical fantasy titled The Thirteenth Warrior which tells the "true" story of the legend of Beowulf. I'd be curious if anyone else agrees with me.

This is a brutal movie with some scenes outlandishly violent. But to be frank by the time one reaches these sequences, the audience has been at least somewhat prepared for the rugged action. Like any good western of the modern era, these are not the superman of the past who rode relentlessly for days without any sense of weariness or pain and these are not men who shot without regard for other lives, even when that regard demands shooting. This is a grim quest demanding grim heroes.

This one's not for all, but if you can handle movie brutality, then Bone Tomahawk is worth the effort.

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Kung Fu The Television Show!

Kung Fu the television show was a cultural event of no small significance. It featured an Asian character as the focus of a story, albeit that character was played by a white actor David Carradine. It broke the mold, to some extent, of the worldviews which predominated the TV airwaves and allowed actual philosophy of nonviolence to seep into the broader culture, ableit that the lead character got into a fight every week. There are a number of contradictions which inform the show, a show which began with great glory in an exceedingly strong TV movie and shifted into a reasonably strong first season. Alas the show would continue to weaken throughout its three year run.

The first year of Kung Fu is truly amazing to watch. In the long tradition of TV, we have a peripatetic hero who finds folks in trouble and helps. He is motivated by his own need to find his brother as he roams the historical western landscape of the United States, a land rife with racism as it has always been. He encounters all manner of threats, some which follow him from China as his crime of murder creates trouble for him here. Kwai Chang Caine as played by Carradine in the first year is almost mute, talking rarely and in a whisper as he attempts to live his life, find his relatives, and help folks who come into his ken. He ends up in jail nearly every other episode, but as we learn is hardly ever confined by the people who constantly underestimate him. The characterization of the folks he meets in the first season is especially strong and memorable. Especially memorable (and key in my mind to the success of the show) are the characters of Master Kan (Phillip Ahn) and Master Po (Keye Luke). These old wise men make the show resonate with a quiet dignity which was and still is uncommon in television.

In the second year Caine loses of his reality, becoming more of a traditional hero and a wee bit more proactive in his choices. One affectation of the role was that Carradine allowed his hair to grow throughout his time as Caine and in the second season we see it hanging in his eyes with regularity as his costume is refined. Gone are the hat and shoes which grounded in reality to a greater degree and more prominent is the flute which proves often a bit annoying. His goals are left unmentioned and his flight as a fugitive gets little mention in the season, almost as if the creators want to move beyond the details of his origin.

The third year of Kung Fu is well and truly a rolling disaster. Carradine's control of the show's details grows and almost all of the choices he seems to make are ones which make the character more of a superhero and less of a real man. He adopts a costume which is remarkable in its lack of practicality and he travels across the western lands with only a single pouch, which like Batman's utility belt has just what is needed in any particular episode. His fugitive past comes into focus and he does find his brother at long last in a series of episodes which are peculiar and ultimately unsatisfying. Carradine also directs some episodes, some of which violate the long-standing structure of the show and are set in China before Caine's odyssey to the U.S. The amateurish nature of some of the production is stunning. The show seems to slowly but steadily running out of gas and in the final episode, contrary to all previous ones, Caine is not seen in the final scene. It's weird but so was this show, one which started with grand promise and ended with bizarre miscues.

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Dojo Classics - Jonah Hex!

Blockbuster is running a special this month, one free movie everyday (if it's not too new). Since I live right next to a Blockbuster, I've been taking advantage of that and yesterday I took a gander at the Jonah Hex movie from last year. It left the theaters so quickly I didn't get a chance to see it, and frankly I'd forgotten about it until I saw it on the racks.

It's sure a short movie, the whole thing like just over eighty minutes long including some lengthy credits. The movie got almost universal pans, but I have to say I found virtues in it.

Josh Brolin is a worthy Hex, his grumbly exterior suits the character well. I read that Thomas Jane wanted the part, and frankly I think he would have been better, at least in looks. He's got a great glare too.

Megan Fox is a lovely girl, but she has almost no part in this movie other than being eye candy. They want to suggest otherwise, but frankly she has little to do and her contributions at the end seem forced.

John Malkovich does one of his usual baddie jobs, but it's become rather typical for him.

Michael Fassbender as the psychotic Burke is interesting and was worthy of more screen time. His demise was easily the most interesting of any of the characters in the movie.

This movie seems to have been a tight flick with the back story melded in to the main plot through flashbacks, but clearly someone thought that wasn't going to be clear enough so they added an odd partially animated "origin" at the beginning which frankly took away from the impact of the movie.
I could almost see where those scenes were supposed to go originally and it would've been best to leave them there. Hex is supposed to be a mystery at first, one that we unravel, but someone didn't have confidence in our ability to do that.

This isn't a great movie by any stretch, but it was entertaining enough with just enough occult and Wild West moments to keep it fresh. You sure can't say it drags, because it is a brisk adventure with some wild violence, for those who must have violence.

I paid nothing to see it, and I didn't feel cheated.

UPDATE: The detail that dates this review is simply that it mentions Blockbuster, a company which died off many years ago now due to the advent of streaming and whatnot. For me the advent of DVDs feels like yesterday, but it's a fast-paced world we live in. As for the movie itself, time has not been kind to Jonah Hex, it's regarded as a dud. I can't disagree, but it's no worse than the dimwitted Lone Ranger we got a few years ago. Why can't Hollywood make a decent western from these kinds of heroes. Jonah Hex could've and should've been a movie on par with the Blade series, a snappy sidebar character with a rich universe in which to play. Missed chance for sure.

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The Lone Ranger!

Reviews of last year's The Lone Ranger were so utterly terrible that I did not go to see it in the theater and neither did I collect it up on dvd, which I saw precious few of. Finally got to see this notorious movie on TV the other night and it lives up to its horrible reputation.

Johnny Depp as a smirking Tonto is entertaining, if strange, but Armie Hammer's portrayal of the Ranger as a lunkhead was embarrassing. I'm sure he was doing his job and following the director's orders, and so I won't hold it against him, but the Lone Ranger presented in this movie is at once too modern in his sensibilities and too stupid to root for. That we're supposed to believe any full-grown man in the 1860's in the American wild west would have such open disdain for firearms is hard enough to swallow, but that he'd retain that disregard half way through a misadventure which had seen the callous murder of his brother, his colleagues, and countless other innocents is impossible to take seriously. I don't know if the plan was to make Tonto look smarter by having the Ranger be such a dolt, but it changes the dynamic between the two so much you have to wonder why they stick together, regardless of mystic mumbo jumbo. Now admittedly this story being told from Tonto's bizarrely skewed 1939 perspective, I guess we're suppose to realize we're getting his impression of the classic heroic duo, but it doesn't work especially well.

And now the story. Since Hollywood seems intent on making only terrible Lone Ranger movies, we only ever see the origin story over and over again, since a sequel is never considered. This variation on the yarn began okay (save for the overly benighted John Reid himself). The ambush sequence was a nice bit of action movie making. After that things begin to get really confusing. The movie seemed to amble from set piece to set piece and paid little attention to momentum. The forward progression common in adventure pieces seemed to get muddled by constant needs to show yet again what a goof the Ranger is and what a wit Tonto could be. The movie, simply put, seems to dawdle in its middle act.

And the finale is a wild and wooly bit of business but as for being to able to comprehend the flow of the complicated stunts and and behaviors, I quit trying and just went along with the exceedingly wild ride. Again some clever scenes, but the parts never really blended into a convincing whole. I suspect this movie came apart in the editing process where it was either story ineffectively told with cutting or a mess of a flick which editing could not save. I suspect the latter was the case.

Either way it was yet another missed opportunity for a character who deserves so much more.

It's such a mess it makes me miss these guys.

Let alone these guys.

These two fellows are sadly the last who "got" the whole notion of the Lone Ranger. Mr. Moore and Mr. Silverheels, we miss you more each and every day.

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Cowboys And Aliens!

I have to say when I first saw Cowboys and Aliens advertised a few years ago I was intrigued. The idea of blending the science fiction and western genres is a smart thing to do, or can be if handled correctly. And this movie seemed to be well cast with some real blood and thunder types in the leads. How can you go wrong when you have James Bond and Han Solo both mixing it up with bloodthirsty aliens. But apparently you can as this movie didn't do all that well at the box office. I don't pay much attention to that sort of thing, only in so far as it sometimes means I don't get out in time to see a movie before it drifts off into the mist. That happened this time and so I've gone two years without thinking about Cowboys and Aliens all that much, and I've led a relatively happy life.

But this past week, I finally got to see it on television. And I'm sorry I didn't get to the theater. This one has more going for it than I was led to believe by some of the reviews and even some of the advertising. For one thing, it's more of a pure western than I'd expected. The director, Jon Favreau clearly wanted to make a for real western and he does a pretty decent job here. I saw homages to a number of my favorite western flicks (Shane, The Searchers, etc.) show up here and there throughout the story. The movie when it doesn't showcase its science fiction elements looks and feels like a western, and that makes a critical difference when the sci-fi elements do emerge.

There are some things which hurt the movie's effectiveness though. And as believable as Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford are in their respective parts of the Man-with-no-name-for-a-while and the grizzled Civil War veteran, that's just how unbelievable Olivia Wilde is as the love interest of sorts. She just doesn't fit, and that may have been intentional, but it hurts the rough and tumble feel of the movie. She's just not very credible as an action heroine.

I wasn't all that crazy about the aliens either. They were B.E.M.s for sure, but like many modern movie aliens I found them hard to decipher visually, aside from the fact they had claws and were really nimble. They were sort of stock-aliens. They didn't develop as characters, but remained almost exclusively an opposing force. That's one way of playing it, but I'm not sure it was intentional.

And the biggest deficiency is the length of the movie. This movie's final act feels too long. There's a lot to do, but frankly they spend an awful long time on the battle sequences with lots of repetitive scenes of aliens jumping up and down on cowboys and indians. They seemed less of a threat too in the final battle, much less imposing than the single alien much of the movie is spent tracking.

But in the end, credible performances by Craig, Ford, Clancy Brown as a preacher, and David Carradine as the town sheriff, help pull off a movie that I liked better than I expected.

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Ulzana's Raid!

I caught this powerful little 1972 flick again a few days ago. I've only ever seen it on broadcast television, so I have never seen a theater cut of this movie (there are two apparently), and for a long time I assumed this was a TV movie, though a grim one indeed.

Burt Lancaster is outstanding as a grizzled scout named McIntosh attached to an Arizona cavalry force given the duty of overlooking the local Apache reservation among other things. When a dour Indian named Ulzana takes a few braves off the reservation and begins a small but brutal murder raid, Lancaster and a raw Lieutenant named DeBuin played by a young Bruce Davison take a few troops out to find and stop him.

This is grim stuff and plays very sparely and quietly. There are few blaring cavalry charges, and the ones there are are mostly futile. This is the story of a few men battling a game of deadly wits with another few men with lives hanging in the balance. The relatively small nature of the crimes committed add to the tension, as the story keeps its focus on the personalities of those destroyed.

The movie is reputedly a commentary on the Vietnam War and that might track, given what we see of a U.S. military force trying to bring to bay an indigenous force and being changed brutally by the experience. As grim as the movie can be at times, Native Americans are not demonized but always presented as men who are driven by passions which at once seem alien and commonplace.

The one conceit of the movie which strikes me most is that Ulzana (Joaquin Martinez), the titular "villain" of the movie never speaks, save to chant a bit toward the end. This somber and quiet bit of acting makes his motives inscrutable, though the viewer does identify regrettably with the Apaches. That is also because of the strong performance of Jorge Luke as Ke-Ni-Tay, an Apache who works with the cavalry and who offers a window into the Apache culture and way of thinking.


This is good stuff, with a lot of veteran actors like Richard Jaekel (as a tried and true veteran Sergeant) showing up and delivering rock solid performances. There are a number of actors commonly seen on television, which is one reason I always thought this Robert Aldridge directed movie was a television effort to begin with.

It's highly recommended. If you've not seen Ulzana's Raid and you like westerns, you are in for a treat. This one is in my list of top five westerns for sure.

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Jonah Hex!

Blockbuster is running a special this month, one free movie everyday (if it's not too new). Since I live right next to a Blockbuster, I've been taking advantage of that and yesterday I took a gander at the Jonah Hex movie from last year. It left the theaters so quickly I didn't get a chance to see it, and frankly I'd forgotten about it until I saw it on the racks.

It's sure a short movie, the whole thing like just over eighty minutes long including some lengthy credits. The movie got almost universal pans, but I have to say I found virtues in it.

Josh Brolin is a worthy Hex, his grumbly exterior suits the character well. I read that Thomas Jane wanted the part, and frankly I think he would have been better, at least in looks. He's got a great glare too.

Megan Fox is a lovely girl, but she has almost no part in this movie other than being eye candy. They want to suggest otherwise, but frankly she has little to do and her contributions at the end seem forced.

John Malkovich does one of his usual baddie jobs, but it's become rather typical for him.

Michael Fassbender as the psychotic Burke is interesting and was worthy of more screen time. His demise was easily the most interesting of any of the characters in the movie.

This movie seems to have been a tight flick with the back story melded in to the main plot through flashbacks, but clearly someone thought that wasn't going to be clear enough so they added an odd partially animated "origin" at the beginning which frankly took away from the impact of the movie.

I could almost see where those scenes were supposed to go originally and it would've been best to leave them there. Hex is supposed to be a mystery at first, one that we unravel, but someone didn't have confidence in our ability to do that.

This isn't a great movie by any stretch, but it was entertaining enough with just enough occult and Wild West moments to keep it fresh. You sure can't say it drags, because it is a brisk adventure with some wild violence, for those who must have violence.

I paid nothing to see it, and I didn't feel cheated.

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